


the delayed axel

by Naraht



Series: trials of Coach Yakov [5]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Class Issues, Depression, Divorce, Excessive Backstory, F/M, Gen, Grief, Jewish Characters, Moscow, Nostalgia, Past Infidelity, Post-Soviet Angst, Pre-Canon, Saint Petersburg, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Yakov Is A Bit Of A Player
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-08
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-24 00:48:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15618762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: In which both Victor and Yakov have to remake themselves – Victor after his first Olympic gold and Yakov after his divorce.





	1. Chapter 1

_"No single word in English renders all the shades of 'toska.' At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness." – Vladimir Nabokov_

_"Your past self is dead! People who can be reborn as many times as necessary are the strong ones." – Lilia Baranovskaya_

***

In later years Yakov referred to it only as _your gopnik season_ , or through dark allusions to _that delayed axel of yours_. He said it in the same way he might have said _the year you had your nervous breakdown._

Effectively it had been the same thing. Effectively it had happened to both of them.

***

After Worlds was over nothing could keep Yakov from his traditional late March trip to Tel Aviv. He came home with a sunburn, the prospect of a divorce decree to be applied for, and the conviction that next season was going to be a massive headache. From the back of the taxi he gazed out at the dirty, slushy piles of snow lining Moscovsky Prospect – unflatteringly lit by the pitiless spring sun – and asked himself what on earth one was meant to do with a twenty-year-old Olympic gold medalist. 

Victor Nikiforov was on top of the world. The endorsements and sponsorships, which had hardly been thin on the ground before, had come pouring in since Turin. Everyone wanted an interview. Everyone wanted a piece of him. It was the most dangerous of times for a young athlete. 

He had fully expected Victor to go a little bit off the rails. It was an occupational hazard of coaching teenagers who developed, if all went well, into young adults with the world at their feet. Impulsive, self-centred Victor, only too aware of his own beauty, was exactly the type to be seduced into becoming a celebrity first and an athlete second.

 _If he gets himself a reality show,_ Yakov had told Josef at Turin, only half joking, _I'll wash my hands of him. I'll send him to America to train with Galina. Apparently she's willing to put up with that sort of thing; I'm not._

So far, however, there had been surprisingly little to put up with. Immediately after winning gold at Turin, he had apparently persuaded Christophe Giacometti to try sticking his dick into the hole in the gold medal. This had been no more than youthful high spirits, which Yakov had forgiven (after a good bit of shouting) because in the end they had managed to get the medal off again without the need for medical intervention. Then, at Worlds, he and Giacometti had given one another impromptu haircuts before the banquet. This was also fine, because Yakov had been thinking that it was time for Victor to develop a more mature image, and also because he had it on good authority that the cleaners at the rink were getting tired of fishing mats of long silver hair out of the drain in the men's locker room.

None of this counted as going off the rails. Giacometti liked to fancy himself a bad boy, but if anyone was the bad influence in that relationship – if indeed it was a relationship – it was Victor. At least Giacometti was a fellow skater who understood the rigors and demands of training. Yakov had been expecting something far worse, along the lines of a sudden announcement from Victor that he had become Angelina Jolie's new toyboy and was planning to move to Los Angeles to start a film career. 

And he was still waiting.

In the airport arrivals hall, before catching his taxi, Yakov had bought a stack of newspapers and magazines from a kiosk. All the tabloids, _Hello!, OK, Otdohni,_ anything with a line in celebrity gossip. Of course he subscribed to a topnotch media monitoring agency that offered translation services, and was invaluable for the foreign news. On top of this he had every possible transliteration of Victor's name programmed into Google Alerts (one of his nieces, who did intelligence work for the Israeli army, had helped him with that), and when it came down to it there was no news about Victor that his fan club wouldn't be all over within fifteen minutes anyway. But Yakov was accustomed to print, and this was still the simplest way of finding out what his top athlete had been up to while he was gone.

While the taxi crawled across the Trinity Bridge, stuck behind two tour buses and an obviously suicidal cyclist, he flipped through the pages of the magazines with an increasing irritation that was, he knew, entirely irrational. 

_Victor Nikiforov walking his dog in Maritime Victory Park. Victor Nikiforov spotted having a cup of tea and a macaron at Au Pont Rouge. Victor Nikiforov, patron of the Theatre of Youth, congratulates young students of dance on their performance. Victor Nikiforov cheers on SKA Saint Petersburg in their match against Spartak at the Ice Palace._

That was all. Nothing scandalous. Nothing, truth be told, even mildly interesting. The Figure Skating Federation of Russia would be thrilled. Victor's more conservative sponsors could feel that their investment was secure and had been well spent.

The edgier sponsors might well be slightly disappointed. Yakov himself was slightly disappointed. He threw the magazines in a pile on the seat next to him.

"I told you to take the Liteyny Bridge!" he shouted at the driver, as he would have shouted at one of his athletes if they had replanned their program mid-skate. "What were you thinking going this way? You know what the traffic is like at this time of day!"

The driver just shrugged. "Construction."

He still wasn't used to it. Back in his day he'd been one of the few private citizens in Leningrad to own a car. No doubt it was a good thing that other people now had the privilege, but he didn't have to like the consequences.

On top of this, he was more certain than ever that Victor had been up to something while he was away. What frightened him more than anything was that he didn't yet know what it was.

***

The first morning back was always the worst. Yakov arrived at the rink at seven a.m. as usual, having fought his way through the St Petersburg sleet and the ungodly morning traffic, half hoping that Victor would turn up late in order to give him something to shout about, half fearing that he would never turn up at all. But there was Victor on the ice already, skating slow, lazy loops around the rink, reaching out longing, graceful arms to something or someone only he could see.

When he spotted Yakov, he skated over to the boards right away.

"You're here!" said Yakov.

"Where else would I be?" replied Victor. "You don't even sound happy to see me."

He sounded a little bit tired, a little bit subdued. Usually, after less than twelve hours apart, he greeted Yakov in mock-flirtatious tones, fluttering his eyelashes: _did you miss me, Yakov?_ Today he only stood with a toe pick in the ice and let his hair – still just long enough – fall over one eye. Yakov supposed that an early morning alarm after two weeks of freedom must have been a shock to the system. Perhaps Victor had been at private parties every night till dawn with those oligarch friends of his, whether or not it had got into the papers. Perhaps he'd been celebrating privately with someone at home in his own bed – or in theirs. Yakov didn't want to know.

Scratch that. He did want to know. He just didn't want to think about it.

"I'm not going to fall over myself to applaud you for doing no more than you ought to do, Vitya." He folded his arms. "You've had more than enough of that since Turin."

"I know. I'm tired of it."

"Well, then. Are you warmed up? Can you show me that you haven't forgotten everything you knew in the last two weeks?"

"Of course, Yakov," said Victor, and skated off.

 _This isn't right at all,_ thought Yakov suspiciously. _He's too... pliant._

***

It continued like that for the next few weeks. Victor turned up for practice on time, skated and worked out as Yakov directed him, and then went home again. To any other coach this might have seemed perfectly normal. To Yakov it was unsettling.

It was if the infurating, vibrant, _real_ Victor that he knew had been pithed and replaced with this, something that only looked like Victor. A severed frog's leg that twitched with the application of electricity, and could perform quadruple jumps. To some extent it seemed like an improvement. Perhaps it was because Yakov himself found himself lacking the energy or the will to be anything more than the man who flipped the switch.

As a coach you weren't meant to give your athletes any reason to think of you as human. If they complained about having to be on the ice at six a.m. every morning in the depths of the Russian winter, you were not meant to remind them that you had to be there too. If they complained that their packed training schedule left no time for relaxation or a social life, you were not meant to remind them that you were managing five other elite athletes with schedules just as packed as their own. You were meant to tend to their bodies, bandage their wounds, let them cry on your shoulder, firmly remind them to use condoms, and become the inevitable recipient of teenage confessions of sexual confusion and loneliness, all the while they assumed that you slept in your office and loved no one but them.

Yakov was getting divorced. Most of his skaters didn't even know.

He supposed that they might have found out if they ever read the papers. There had been a few articles in the press, surprising Yakov no end when the result of the Google Alert was his own name, even if most of the articles had led with "the Bolshoi's _prima ballerina_ Lilia Baranovskaya" rather than "leading figure skating coach Yakov Feltsman."

Despite the press coverage, the topic never seemed to come up at the rink. Yakov quietly took down the portrait of Lilia – mid _grand jeté_ – that had hung on the wall of his office. No one said anything. The physios and trainers knew better than to ask. His students hardly realised there was anything to ask about. The majority of them had never even met Lilia, who was hardly ever in St Petersburg these days given her schedule with the Bolshoi.

Victor knew.

He had lived with Yakov and Lilia for six years, aged between eleven and seventeen, and how could you not see someone as a person when you spat your toothpaste into the same sink as them? How could you fail to realise that your coach's marriage was breaking down when you'd heard the screaming fights from the next room?

Maybe Victor had realised it. Maybe Victor had realised that his own presence in the apartment on the Griboyedov Canal had hardly helped matters. (Although God knew there was more than enough blame to go around. Most of it to be heaped firmly on Lilia's proud head.)

Whatever the reason, Victor had moved out once he turned eighteen, as soon as he was old enough to buy his own apartment with the flood of endorsement money that had started to pour into his bank account. He'd left Yakov and Lilia to their private unhappiness and embarked upon his own.

No. Why would he think that? Why assume that Victor was unhappy?

Yakov, standing by the boards, rubbed at his nose with the palm of his hand, smearing half-exuded sweat grown chill in the climate-controlled air. Halfway across the rink, Georgi missed the landing of a triple lutz and went sliding out across the chewed-up ice of the tail end of a practice session. He slammed hard into the boards. Yakov ignored it. _You're projecting your own misery onto everyone else. Is it so difficult to believe that Victor's simply growing up sooner than you expected?_

Georgi dragged himself to his feet, showing off a scrape on one bare bicep as if he expected sympathy, but Yakov had not got where he was through sensitivity to pain.

"Yes? And? Don't fall next time! You shouldn't be falling on triples! Give me three clean landings in a row before you dare step off the ice!"

Victor stroked towards them, wound himself up into a three-turn and perfectly landed his own triple lutz right in front of Yakov and Georgi. It wasn't his usual corner of the rink.

"Vitya!" shouted Yakov. "Sloppy! Appalling! What sort of edge was that?"

Looking relieved, Georgi slid backwards out of the line of fire and away. Victor only shrugged in weary acknowledgment of the rebuke.

"And you call that a lutz? What are you, one of Trusova's skaters? Don't think that you can get away with that sort of thing just because you have an Olympic medal hanging around your neck now!"

Yakov had always been known for his strictness with jump mechanics; he believed it was the secret to his skaters' success. But Victor's jump had, at worst, been launched from a flat edge. Far worse was perpetrated on the ice at every major competition without so much as a -0.1 GOE deduction from the judges. Not to mention the fact that success bred success in the eyes of the ISU. The unspoken truth was that Victor almost certainly _could_ get away with that sort of thing now. Judges saw what they wanted to see; a flat edge disappeared in the blink of an eye and the glamor of the high, rapid rotations following.

If it _had_ been a flat edge. Yakov had still been looking at Georgi when Victor jumped; he had only seen the jump out of the corner of his eye. Nonetheless, it didn't do to let Victor get complacent. If he'd had a clean outside edge, surely he would speak up and say so.

"What is this sloppiness, Vitya?!"

"I don't know, Yakov," said Victor quietly. You could see the slight shifts of his body as he attempted to reconstruct the jump in his imagination. "I thought I had my weight on the outside. I can't seem to concentrate somehow. I'll do it right next time."

"Yes, you will!" said Yakov.

 _He's definitely unhappy,_ he thought, watching Victor skate away. It was not the conclusion he had wanted to reach.

***

So they went on like this, two excuses for human beings.

Yakov had never been good at keeping his temper in check. He was worse now; he knew it. Even his colleagues at the Sport Club, the junior coaches and the trainers and the physios, had started to avoid him in the hallways, looking aside with guilty eyes as if they were the ones who ought to feel ashamed. He could hear conversations die away in the hall outside of the door of his office, a cautious pause between the last footstep and the knock as if his visitors were trying to divine his mood before daring to draw his attention. It only made him more angry.

One day he found himself shouting at little Mila Babicheva for daring to come onto the ice to practice her triple salchow with a frayed skate lace. Lack of respect, lack of forethought, endangering herself, wasting the time of her coaches... he accused her of everything short of moral turpitude.

It was only when skaters across the rink started to look in their direction that he noticed she had tears gathering in her eyes. Although she was only eleven, she was too tough to allow them to fall or even to acknowledge their presence. Yakov approved.

"You'd feel worse if you did that during a competition!" he concluded, moderating his tone slightly. "So now you've learned a lesson! And you won't do it again, will you?"

Mila sniffed slightly and raised her chin. She looked like she wanted to wipe her nose on her sleeve but was avoiding it by sheer force of will. 

"No, Yakov Davidovich," she said, forcing a watery smile. "I'm sorry, Yakov Davidovich."

"Good girl. Now go and change that lace!"

Mila skated off at speed, nearly colliding with Georgi in her haste to get off the ice.

"And watch where you're going!" shouted Yakov at her rapidly retreating back. 

Then he wondered whether this had been overkill. _I'll ask Lilia,_ he thought, before remembering that his problems were no longer Lilia's concern. The only request he could make of her now was to sign the divorce papers. Any day now.

In short he was unfit for human company. The only consolation was that he wasn't alone. The only person who wasn't avoiding him was Victor; it seemed, thought Yakov darkly, that Victor was in the sort of perverse mood where he actually welcomed a helping of verbal abuse.

It was the time of year when they began to piece together Victor's programs for the upcoming season. Usually this involved Lilia's presence: she had choreographed every one of his programs since he began to compete internationally. Reluctantly, she had choreographed these too – back in February and March when St Petersburg had still been in the dark grip of winter – taking Yakov's raw sketches of jumping passes and spins and turning them into works of art. Yakov was surprised that she had agreed to do it at all; he thought perhaps it was out of relief at the knowledge that she would soon see the back of him. Of both of them.

Ordinarily she spent quite a bit of time putting Victor through his paces, adjusting her choreography to fit him as Yakov's grandfather might have taken in the seams of a suit, pulling him up sharply when he failed to do justice to her creative vision. This year she had said flatly that she would not work with Victor when Yakov was around, that Victor would have to travel to Moscow to fit _her_ schedule with the Bolshoi. This implied a ballet of movement as subtle as the one on the ice.

In the mean time, Yakov and Victor were left in Piter doing their best to come to grips with Lilia's program. One of the assistant coaches was videotaping the rehearsal – afterwards the tape would be couriered overnight to Moscow for her feedback. Yakov tried to stay out of the shot; he didn't think that Lilia would appreciate seeing him. So he stood to one side, following each phrase and gesture of the new program. It was odd to see the slight awkwardnesses remaining in Victor's delivery, as if he were a thoroughbred colt still stretching his legs in the pasture. Soon it would soon become as familiar to both of them as breathing. 

Though perhaps Victor wasn't doing his best to come to grips with the program. There was one triple axel that he still hadn't landed, though he'd run that section three times today. Not once had he fallen on it, nor had his capacity for height or power failed him. Every time he'd – seemingly – popped it, his leg coming out into a slow, massive, open jump utterly unlike his tight and rapidly rotated quads.

Yakov beckoned Victor over to the side of the rink. He waited while Victor took a drink of water, waited until he was sure Dima was no longer recording.

"What the hell was that?" he growled, thinking that he would give Victor an opportunity to come clean. He gave the camcorder a second look. The red light was off. "You keep popping that triple axel."

Victor shrugged and blew his nose on the tissue that Yakov handed him. "I didn't pop it. I just don't think it ought to be a triple."

" _I don't think..._ " mimicked Yakov. "Did anyone ask what you think?"

"I meant to do it that way. It's a delayed single axel."

"Do you think I can't recognise a delayed axel, Vitya? Do you think that I haven't seen enough of them to last me a lifetime? Do you want to make me suffer? Who do you think you are, _Robin Cousins_?"

Yakov could practically feel the veins standing out on his forehead. This YouTube was a curse. Instead of listening to his coach, as he ought to be doing, Victor was apparently spending his evenings taking inspiration from the routines of Yakov's old competitors. The worst of it was that Victor's skating reminded Yakov of no one so much as Cousins: that absurdly leggy grace retained into his adult years, seeming to pose no impediment to his skating despite the high center of gravity, the power and height in his jumps mockingly effortless.

"I like it better that way," said Victor.

Yakov was stunned. "I don't give a damn how you like it!"

Dima had been lingering with the camcorder dangling from one hand, ostensibly uncertain whether he was needed to continue recording. In fact he was eavesdropping. Yakov waved an angry hand of dismissal in his direction. Dima went.

Now Yakov could really lay into Victor. There was no need to grasp for words. He knew exactly what he wanted to say, ineloquent though it might be.

"You entitled little bastard! What do you want, anyway? You should have skated for the Soviet Union, all for the glory of the Motherland! You would have been thrilled to have a Lada and a two-room apartment, to go abroad and be followed everywhere by KGB spies, you wouldn't have had a single sponsorship deal... And your opinion would have been worth nothing! _Nothing,_ Vitya, do you hear me?"

He paused to suck in a breath. Over at the other side of the rink, Dima was still looking in their direction. Probably he could hear everything. Yakov didn't care.

"And everything I did," he concluded, carried away, the words raw and stinging as soon as they fell from his lips, "everything I did, I had to be twice as good as the rest, because I am a Jew!"

"You never said that before," said Victor.

Yakov felt a little dart through his chest. "You knew!"

 _You're alone._ The thought echoed through his mind. Lilia had understood; it had been the same for her. Who else would understand?

"Yes, of course, that you're Jewish, but not that it was – like that."

"Don't change the subject! That's not the point and you know it!"

Victor was clearly choosing to be obtuse on purpose. "What is the point?"

"We considered ourselves lucky," spluttered Yakov, falling back upon the cliche, "if we were able to find salami and blue jeans!"

"Oh Yakov," drawled Victor, "you are such a _sovok_. I wouldn't get out of bed for blue jeans and salami."

"I'm amazed that you bother to get out of bed at all."

Victor looked down, blinked rapidly, his silver eyelashes flickering. _That really hurt him,_ thought Yakov, a numb and distant surprise. They stared at one another, silence falling between them.

Victor took a ragged breath. "It's beautiful," he said. It took a moment before Yakov realised that he was talking about the delayed axel. "It's surprising, it's graceful, it's _fresh_. If the judges don't see that, there's nothing I can do about it."

They were now back on familiar ground. Yakov entered in with gratitude. " _Beauty,_ Vitya..."

"...is only relevant if it translates into high PCS scores, I know, I know."

Such had been the burden of many a lecture to teenage Vitya, who had been convinced that long hair, black nailpolish and an androgynous, bondage-inspired costume were the key to figure skating glory. The infuriating thing was that he hadn't been entirely wrong.

"Delayed axels belong in a trunk in the attic with a bag of mothballs and your coach's old bronze medal." 

_And the Soviet Union,_ thought Yakov. _And my marriage._

"I'll have the high PCS scores, I promise you that. I'll have all the combinations. Can't I have this too? Please?"

"I don't see why you need it," said Yakov.

"How long do people care about a gold medal, Yakov? Six weeks? Six months, maybe? They have short memories; they don't love me for myself. Someone new will come along – who knows, maybe even Chris. I have to show them something different this season, or they'll forget about me. Something fresh."

Yakov thought that Victor was underestimating the extent to which Russia had taken its new champion to its heart. Or the extent to which that Calvin Klein photoshoot would remind Russia about Victor once he was plastered across its billboards wearing nothing but a rather (to Yakov's eyes) ill-fitting pair of jeans. But he did not say this.

"What about a quad flip?" he said.

"I'll try," replied Victor, responding seriously to a question that hadn't been serious at all. "If you want me to. If you give me some time in the harness, I think, I do think I could..."

"Vitya! Don't be an idiot."

"I was just saying, until then, if I want something in the routine to surprise people, it's either this or..."

He didn't have to wait for Victor to finish the sentence.

"No _backflips_ , Vitya! You know the rules – and you know I don't make them. They're banned by the ISU, one-footed landing or not! Do you want me to have a heart attack? Have the last shreds of the respect and love you once felt for your coach disappeared at last?"

"You don't understand, Yakov. I have to do _some_ thing."

His voice broke for an instant on the penultimate syllable, urgency edged with a suppressed hysteria.

"Your old, irrelevant coach never won a gold medal, did he? So naturally he knows nothing about anything now!"

"Yakov, no, I'm sorry, I didn't – that's not it."

Yakov was losing his patience. "What is it, then?"

"It's just, otherwise, I..." 

Victor shook his head. The hysteria, if that was what it had been, slid from his voice as quickly as it had come, slipping under the ice and into the deep beneath. Not for the first time, Yakov marveled at these sudden shifts of Victor's, these moments of iron, unexpected self-control.

"I wanted to, that's all," said Victor. He shrugged offhandedly.

A silence. Yakov had the feeling that he was going to get nothing more in the way of explanation, that Victor could not have offered one even if he had wanted to.

"Of course you know best," Victor added. "Of course I love you."

"I know," said Yakov.

Without warning, Victor threw himself into Yakov's arms, driving him backwards on the ice with the force of the embrace. 

"Of course I love you, Yakov," repeated Victor with a fierce desperation in his ear. "Who else is there to love?"

A lingering scent of cologne mingled with the smell of fresh sweat and the deeper stink of unwashed polyester.

 _Was he wearing that T-shirt yesterday?_ wondered Yakov. _The day before? Do his sponsors not give him enough to wear?_

He racked his brains but couldn't remember the color of yesterday's T-shirt. He wondered whether Victor would start crying. He hated it when people cried. Sometimes he wondered why he'd ever gone into coaching.

"You've been overworking," he said, because it was the only explanation he could grasp or voice aloud. "You should have taken a longer break after the end of the season. Your nerves are catching up with you now, that's all it is. A rest day for you tomorrow."

He could feel Victor begin to tense in his arms. "No, please don't..."

"Don't argue," he added. "You'll sleep in, then you'll come to my apartment. I'll make you dinner. We'll watch a film. You can stay over if you like. It's necessary for you to rest, Vitya, and if I have to supervise it personally, then that's what I'll do!"

Victor smiled, and Yakov realised that it was the first unforced smile he had seen from him in quite a while.

"That would be great, Yakov," he said, but there was still an edge of sadness somewhere in the curve of his lips.

***

Yakov lived in an undistinguished little apartment on the Vyborg Side, which he had rented without much thought after moving out of Lilia's elegant place near the Mariinsky Theatre. It had new double glazed windows, and freshly painted white walls, and that was about all you could say for it. He had furnished it in what he could only assume was a fit of absence of mind, because the result gave the impression that he had stopped halfway. 

It had two bedrooms, because he imagined that it would not be too long before he had another young protégé living with him, as Victor once had done. But for the moment he lived alone, with the second bedroom nothing more than a storeroom for his suitcases, his winter clothes and his old costumes. Apart from the movers and the cleaner, Victor would be the first person to step across the threshold.

"Look, Yakov, I brought us some Belgian beer," said Victor, brandishing a six-pack of bottles as he stepped into the apartment. Then he stopped dead, looking around the small sitting room. "I didn't know you harbored a secret passion for IKEA."

"Nothing like that," grumbled Yakov, feeling judged by Victor's scrutiny. He knew he could have done better with the place; aesthetics were his business, after all. But for years he had left the interior decoration to Lilia, and he had not quite been able to bring himself to take up the mantle once again. "It's cheap and it's simple."

Victor gave a single small nod of approval, as if he worked in quality control and had just passed Yakov's flat for habitability. "Very modern. I just didn't think it was your style."

"It isn't," said Yakov. "Come in, come in. I've made pelmeni; real Siberian pelmeni, not the ones you get out of bags in a freezer case."

That won a real smile. However gourmet Victor's tastes might seem from the puff articles in newspapers and magazines – and probably were, when he was dining out – he had an undeniable fondness for comfort food.

Victor leaned against the counter in Yakov's little kitchen, looking intently into the boiling water as they waited for the pelmeni to float to the surface. It was just like old times, although teenage Victor had been without the bottle of Westvleteren from which he was now regularly swigging.

"They're floating now," said Victor. "You've just got it boiling so hard that it's hard to see."

"Who's the expert in pelmeni?" grumbled Yakov. "Learn from the master, Vitya. You can't rush these things."

Once they were done to his satisfaction – not Victor's – he fished them out, piled them onto two plates, and finished with a generous scattering of dill. Sour cream was to taste. Victor took the spoon and put a measured amount neatly on one side of his plate, glancing at Yakov from under silver lashes as if to check that he approved. But this was the off season and, of all the things that worried Yakov about Victor, his weight had never been one of them.

His own weight was another matter, but Yakov piled sour cream unstintingly on top of his pelmeni. _Why the hell not, it's not as if I'm skating anymore, and there's no Lilia to tell me off._ It was something he'd been telling himself a lot recently.

"Yakov!" said Victor. "Your cholesterol!"

 _He remembered,_ thought Yakov. _He actually remembered._

"What do you know about that?" he asked gruffly, covering his surprise. Victor was notoriously forgetful. He 'lost' his iPod – due to forgetting that he wore it strapped to his arm – at least once a week.

"I overheard you talking to Tolya about it a couple of weeks ago. You said you could blame the high blood pressure on us, but you weren't sure about the cholesterol."

"No one asked you to eavesdrop." Now that he thought of it, he did remember saying something of the sort to Tolya, one of the trainers. He was almost certain that he had added Lilia to the list of causes of his high blood pressure, but perhaps Victor was going through one of his rare diplomatic phases. "It's not for you to worry about."

"All right, Yakov," said Victor, smiling one of the vacant, airheaded smiles that, on the rink, always made Yakov want to shake him. "Let's eat! I'm starving!"

***

Thankfully Victor was not expecting deep conversation and sympathy. From his bag he produced a DVD of the latest Bond film, which Yakov didn't think had even been released in Russia yet, and slipped it with a flourish into the DVD player. And they settled down with their pelmeni and beer to watch _Casino Royale_.

Predictably it didn't hold a candle to the classic Bond films. In between the action scenes, they found themselves talking about skating instead. What else did they have to talk about?

"I thought about doing a James Bond routine," said Victor, "but it would just be too predictable. Besides, skating in black tie is more Stéphane's style. I don't know how he does it, I'd feel so constricted."

Faintly flushed, he unbuttoned one button of his Henley. The windows were still steamed up from the boiling pelmeni. He reached for another bottle of beer.

"I wanted to skate to _From Russia With Love_ ," said Yakov. "A very, very long time ago."

"Why didn't you?"

"They never would have let me. We saw it on bootleg tapes. I knew someone who knew someone. We weren't supposed to be watching James Bond at all."

Victor shook his head. "You should do an exhibition skate with me sometime."

He was always trying to persuade Yakov to do ice shows with him. Yakov, who had not skated for an audience in years, couldn't imagine why. These days teenage girls skated better than he ever had. Mila Babicheva, who was only eleven, could land all the jumps he'd brought to the Olympics in 1980 at the mature age of twenty-seven.

(Meanwhile Lilia was still the finest ballerina in the world. Certainly of her generation; quite possibly of the century. You might say it stood to reason that she had no time for anything else. Perhaps it was even true.)

"As if anyone would pay to watch me skate James Bond."

"It would be great!" continued Victor, failing to notice the sudden descent of Yakov's mood. "I could be Pussy Galore. Wouldn't that be great? With a long wig, since I've cut my hair, and..."

He trailed off uncertainly, gave Yakov a sidelong look from under long eyelashes. Yakov quickly reassessed his view. Victor _had_ noticed his mood. Victor, horrifyingly, had been _trying to cheer him up_. It was the ultimate indignity.

"Idiot boy. I can't swan off to ice shows on a whim. I have my summer camp to think about."

"Sometime," said Victor, a faintly hurt tone.

After _Casino Royale_ and the beer were finished, they moved to vodka and the extensive collection of Soviet-era comedies that Yakov had only slightly ashamedly insisted upon taking in the divorce. They had been his from the start, after all. After _The Diamond Arm_ they had _Office Romance_ , because doing anything other than watching another film would have required more energy. Outside the sky was beginning to grow light, but the dawn came ridiculously early at this time of year.

 _I was going to talk to him,_ thought Yakov, glancing across at the lanky young man who was currently lounging across the couch with both feet resting in his lap. _About whether he's unhappy. About why he's unhappy. Or something like that._ But his head was spinning with the vodka and it seemed too much effort to interrupt something that might bring both of them a little bit of happiness in the moment. On the other hand, whether _Office Romance_ was the thing to bring them that happiness was debatable.

"Love!" exclaimed Victor over the closing credits, an unreadable tone.

Yakov scoffed. "What do you know about love?"

"Nothing," said Victor.

"Don't waste your time finding out. Love is the most brutal sport there is. A young man like you has plenty of other things to enjoy."

A long silence. Yakov half expected Victor to deny it. Or maybe he was just too drunk to respond.

"I'm sorry, you know," said Victor instead. "About Lilia."

There it was. He did know. Yakov downed another shot of vodka before he could bring himself to answer. 

"Maybe I was the one who asked for the divorce. Maybe you should be congratulating me."

More silence. Victor looked at him doubtfully. Yakov asked himself what the hell he thought he was doing discussing his private life with an skater of twenty, scarcely more than a boy.

"It was mutual," he added finally. "That's all you need to know."

It was true – and, come to that, Yakov had indeed made the first overture. Who knew how long they would have gone on otherwise? Lilia, being a dancer, had a terrifyingly high threshold for pain. Most likely they should have ended things years earlier. That didn't mean it had hurt any less. 

"I'm still sorry," said Victor finally. "Aren't you lonely without her?"

If he had not been drunk he would have blown the question off without a response.

"Of course I'm lonely," he said. "But I was lonely before. She was never home anyway."

A long, long silence.

Victor sighed. "People say that I'm really good at blowjobs. No strings attached."

His voice was listless, bored. He was still looking at the blank television screen. It sounded like a casual observation on loneliness and the banality of life. It sounded like a confession of what he had been up to while Yakov was away. It sounded like a nonsequitur.

Yakov knew better. He knew Vitya better. Vitya had been extending an _offer._

Yakov was no stranger to propositions. He might be an old man now, but he was still a powerful man in his sphere, and once upon a time he had been an athletic hero of the Soviet Union. Once upon a time people had actually remarked on his rugged good looks, though his current students might laugh to hear this. Over the years he'd been propositioned by a host of fellow athletes, trainers, coaches, minor government functionaries, diplomats, flight attendants, parents of prospective and current skaters, judges, officials, politicians and ordinary citizens across most of the continents of the world. On one memorable occasion he'd even been propositioned by a Bolshoi ballerina. (You could see how well that had worked out.)

When he was younger his skaters had regularly developed crushes on him. It was inevitable, really: the close quarters, the intensity, the power differential. He'd never really been tempted. Not having received the half-hysterical warnings that his Western counterparts seemed to suffer through, he'd just done his best to ignore it, gone on shouting and correcting and hugging them at competitions like he always did. Sooner or later the crushes had evaporated again. Most of those skaters were now long retired from the sport, with families of their own. No doubt they glanced at Match TV once in a while and were amused to see him, older and fatter and balder, sitting in yet another Kiss and Cry next to yet another skater as if this was all that there was to his life.

Victor had never been one of those skaters with a crush. Nor was he now.

 _Is that the only way he knows to love someone?_ thought Yakov. _Is he really so lonely? Does he really think that I'm that lonely?_ On all counts the answer seemed to be 'yes.'

He fought down his first instinct, which was to recoil in revulsion. Instead he forced himself to draw a breath, then another. Marriage counseling had in the end done almost nothing for him, but at least it had taught him to try to breathe before he started shouting.

He gave Victor a cautious glance. Victor's head was tipped back, resting on the back of the couch. He was gazing up at the ceiling. There was a fractured look in his eyes: unfocused yearning warred with shock at what he had just said, mingling with an obvious, growing terror that Yakov had actually deciphered his veiled hint. Victor bit his lip, his body tensing, gathering himself for yet another command performance. He slowly turned his head to look at Yakov.

"No doubt you're a champion at that too," Yakov grumbled, measuring his words carefully. "And no doubt your dick cures cancer."

Some of the tension seemed to drain from Victor's body. He let his right hand, which had been tucked curled against his chest, fall to his side.

"Apart from skating," he mumbled, "it's the only thing I'm any good at. And really I'm not even..."

Now Yakov had a better excuse to yell. "You're certainly no good at holding your vodka, Vitya! You're drunk! You're making no sense at all!"

"I'm not drunk," said Victor. He sighed. "If I were, I'd be having more fun."

"Well, you're not the only one who thinks this evening has gone to hell in a handbasket."

Yakov sighed in echo of Victor. He began to shift himself forwards on the couch, preparing himself for the difficult task of levering himself upright and going over to the phone to call Victor a taxi. _Better to just forget about it. Get him out of here as soon as possible. Don't give him the chance to embarrass himself again._

Then he thought of Victor wandering alone out into the chilly St Petersburg night, going home to no one... well, going home to a dog, but Yakov didn't count that, even if Victor did. He glanced over again. Victor had made himself comfortable on the couch, tipping his head so that his cheek was nuzzled against the back cushion. A month ago that couch had been sitting on the shop floor at IKEA.

"It's time you went to bed," said Yakov.

Victor opened one bleary eye to look at Yakov. "What, here?" he asked, an overtone of hope.

"You're in no fit state to go anywhere."

"Oh," said Victor. He let his eyes fall closed again. "No."

"But you'd better not fall asleep on the couch! I have a spare room!"

Over the next few minutes Yakov made some token effort to clean up the remains of their evening while Victor poked drunkenly at his phone, claiming that he was texting his dog walker. After he announced his success, Yakov guided him into the little second bedroom. 

Thinking that something like this might happen, he had actually done a bit of preparation – taken the piles of paperwork off the bed and shoved them into a half-open box, pushed a few boxes out of the way, put fresh sheets on the bed. To be fair, they were the first sheets the bed had ever seen, but everything had to start somewhere. He was now glad that he'd made these preparations.

Victor was standing unsteadily near the doorway. As Yakov turned to him, he began to list to one side, bumping his shoulder against the wall and then rebounding slightly. It was impossible to believe that this was a man capable of jumping four rotations and landing backwards on one foot while balanced on a blade only 4 millimeters wide.

"Vitya!" said Yakov. "The bed is right here."

Victor blinked as if he'd been asleep on his feet, struggled to focus his eyes on the bed. "Yes."

And yet he made no effort to move towards it. Victor Nikiforov, the Olympic champion, stood wavering in place, unable to bring himself to close two metres of carpeted floor. All of it had evaporated, the motivation and discipline, everything that had propelled him to gold. Nothing was left.

"Come on," said Yakov, exasperated and yet unable to leave Victor to his own devices. "Come here."

Taking Victor by the arm, he led him to the bed. Victor followed obediently, sat down and promptly collapsed onto his side, his head landing in a spray of silver hair on the pillow.

"Mmm," he said, his voice slightly muffled. "That's nice."

"You, Vitya," said Yakov, hauling Victor's legs up onto the bed and pulling the duvet over him, "are more trouble than anyone I have ever met in my life."

 _Apart from Lilia,_ he thought, a silent amendment.

No answer from Victor. Yakov thought that he must have fallen asleep. As he straightened up to leave, a quiet, blurred voice came from the vicinity of the bed. 

"Please don't go."

Under the duvet there was no sign of movement. Yakov turned to go, thinking it would be safer to pretend that he hadn't heard. Then he had a change of heart. He sat down on the very edge of the bed, feeling the springs bending under his weight. Still no movement from under the duvet. He reached out to lay a hand on the crown of Victor's head, the only part of him that was visible.

"Vitenka," he said. "Vitenka, what is this."

Very softly, almost inaudibly, Victor was weeping. Yakov sat with him until the tears trailed off into sleep.

***

Because he was no longer a young man, Yakov had to get up to piss in the early hours of the morning. On the way back he paused beside the closed door of his spare room, hearing nothing but silence within. It felt good to have Victor under his roof again, if only for a night. However miserable he might be, at least he wasn't getting up to any mischief. 

He remembered how it was when Victor had first come to live with them, a will-of-the-wisp wandering around the apartment in the evening, peeping around door frames as if he wasn't quite certain he was meant to be there at all. A little changeling boy. Now he had another changeling under his roof, a young man in the shape of Victor. Every reaction blunted, every instinct slightly off, slightly wrong. Well, it was not something to think about at four in the morning.

Yakov went back to his own room and fell into a dreamless sleep. When he woke again, it was to the insistent ringing of his phone. He winced; he had a splitting headache. He groped for the phone on his side table, blinking against the bright and alien sunlight coming through his window.

"Yes?"

"It's Dima. At the Sports Palace."

You would have thought that the man's name was _Dima-at-the-Sports-Palace._ Clearly that was all he had to show for his life. He never just said _the rink_ like everyone else.

"What the hell do you want, it's – "

He had been about to say _it's the crack of dawn_ but a quick glance at his watch, which he hadn't taken off, revealed that it was nearly nine. Apparently he hadn't set his alarm either.

"Vitya hasn't turned up for practice," said Dima, delicately avoiding the fact that Yakov was also absent from the rink. "Would you like me to call him, or...?"

Yakov grunted. "Told him to take the day off. I'll be in for my office hours later."

Then he hung up the phone forcibly, which was at least satisfying.

After downing a glass of water and a couple of only slightly off-prescription painkillers – he kept them on hand for emergencies, courtesy of the team doctor – he stomped into the spare room as vigorously as he could manage. In the bed, Victor uncurled himself, looking as raw as a freshly peeled prawn. He threw a hand across his face.

"Yakov...?"

"You are a lightweight, Vitya. Only a few shots of vodka – and this! I bet you don't remember a thing from last night."

A flicker behind still-closed eyelids. "No," said Victor slowly. "I don't..."

Lying, obviously, and thank God for that. They would both pretend they had forgotten. There was nothing you could do with what had happened last night other than take it to the grave. All of it, the tears and the deniable proposition together.

"I didn't think so!" said Yakov more loudly than he had intended. In unison they winced. Yakov continued at a slightly lower volume. "There's no point going to the rink today. A wasted day! This morning all you're fit for is emergency hydration. This afternoon you'll do some serious stretching and reflect on your life choices."

"OK," said Victor, sounding as if keeping body and soul aligned was still an effort.

"And I won't let you leave before you've eaten a proper breakfast."

He hoped this sounded appropriately strict, a penance imposed, emergency measures to put Victor back on the virtuous trajectory of his training plan. He hoped Victor didn't point out that they had been drinking his vodka.

Victor disappeared quickly into the bathroom and remained there for longer than anyone ought to spend in the morning. Yakov put on a pot of kasha – his usual breakfast, the cure for all ills – and fried up some eggs and _syrniki_ to soak up the rest of the alcohol. When Victor finally emerged from the bathroom, he was wrapped up in one of Yakov's old bathrobes, a now-faded paisley wool of which he had been very proud when Lilia had brought it back from Bucharest for him in 1983. All the dancers there wore them to morning class, she had said. It was too small for him now; Victor, leaning against the door frame with his hair still all damp and disarranged, made it look as if it had been ripped from a page in a fashion magazine.

Yakov wondered what box Victor had dug it out of, then remembered that it had been hanging in the closet of the spare room.

"That's my bathrobe," he said, stirring the kasha.

"Can I borrow it? It's so amazingly retro."

"Absolutely not! Sit down. Eat something."

Victor obediently slipped into one of the chairs at the little kitchen table. With silent, appreciative concentration, he consumed his eggs and _syrniki_ and kasha. When the plate and the bowl were both empty, Yakov pressed a second helping on him.

"But Yakov, my meal plan...?"

"Eat," said Yakov implacably. "It soaks up the vodka."

Victor ate. Watching from across the table, Yakov couldn't help but wonder when he had turned into his own mother. He remembered Lilia, just nineteen and thin as a rail, sitting down for the first time in his mother's tiny kitchen and refusing all but the smallest helping of kugel. Back then, out of the two of them, he had been the famous one.

"Who does she think she is," his mother had asked afterwards, "that she can come into my kitchen and tell me what I should put in front of her? A daughter of the Politburo?"

Yakov had been too in love to keep his mouth shut. "I told you she's a dancer in the Bolshoi, Mama."

"And is the Olympian also too grand to eat his mother's kugel now?" she had riposted, as quick as a fencer. 

When she really wanted to take him down a notch, she called him _the bronze medallist_. It was criticism rather than compliment. But Yakov knew – his brother has told him – that she never stopped talking to her friends about his successes.

By contrast Lilia's successes had never been of much interest to her. In parallel with Gorbachev and Reagan they had eventually forged their own fragile détente, although the chill had deepened again when Lilia made it clear that she had no intention of putting her career on hold to give Yakov a child. Twenty-six years and at least three abortions later, she had not changed her mind. 

_It's definitely too late now,_ concluded Yakov, watching the progress of Victor's spoon up and down to his bowl.

"I think you should choreograph your own exhibition skate this year," he said.

Poised just above the spoon, Victor's mouth formed an "o" of surprise. "Really? You mean it?"

The warmth he'd been feeling towards Victor stiffened almost instantly into the more usual grudgingly fond annoyance. "Why shouldn't I mean it?"

"Well, just...I guess because Lilia Mikhailovna isn't going to choreograph for me anymore...?"

"Not everything in the world is about Lilia, whether she believes it or not!"

Victor tilted his head to the side. "Do you think I'd be a good choreographer?"

Yakov could suddenly feel his heartbeat pounding in a vein in his forehead. His hangover, not fully quenched by the painkillers, was beginning to return for an encore. "That's for you to prove."

Victor looked like he'd hoped for something more. It was the expression he wore when he was trying to look grateful for a silver medal. It was the expression he wore when he was afraid he was about to come in second. "Oh. Thank you Yakov."

"You can work on it," said Yakov, "while you're away for Fantasia on Ice."

Victor would be out of the country for six whole weeks – and, if only temporarily, someone else's problem. What bliss it would be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can see examples of Robin Cousins' delayed axel [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpGOA3l57TY&t=78s) and [here](https://youtu.be/MEec6XAhsUg?t=31s).


	2. Chapter 2

Yakov's divorce came through in May, when the White Nights were just beginning. It was the season when people started gathering on the banks of the Neva in the small hours of the morning to watch the bridges going up, celebrating the brief Saint Petersburg summer.

He went to collect the divorce papers from ZAGS as he had agreed to do. He wasn't even certain where Lilia was; perhaps she had already left the country on tour. Standing outside the office he toyed with the idea of simply not picking them up, of remaining married despite it all. But it would only lead to more recriminations and more trouble when Lilia got back and realised what he'd done.

It took no more than fifteen minutes to find the right office, stand in line and receive a few sheets of paper from a bored clerk. He tucked the papers into his briefcase and went back to the Sports Palace.

Well. So he was a free man now.

He'd experienced the sudden taste of freedom – so-called – once before, with the fall of the Soviet Union. It had been long anticipated, long overdue. Even so, freedom had quickly lost its lustre. In the lean years of the early 90s, inflation had devoured his once-generous state salary in a matter of months. Decaying ice, crumbling buildings, uncertain prospects. At least the Sport Club had considered Yakov important enough to keep paying him regularly; many of its staff hadn't been so lucky. He'd sold a few old medals – and a few of Lilia's fur coats – to raise a little bit of money to lend to his assistants, enough to buy decent food at least. He, a Master of Sport of the Soviet Union, had been reduced to that. For a long while it had felt as if he – and everything he'd known – had been thrown on the scrap heap of history.

But at least back then he'd had Lilia by his side. Together they'd decided not to emigrate to America or Canada or Israel, as so many of their peers had done. In retrospect it had been the right decision. 

At least they'd finally been able to read Solzhenitsyn, Grossman and Yerofeev out in the open, bought from a shop rather than passed surreptitiously as a sheaf of typescript from hand to hand. For a long while they had considered that consolation enough. Probably it had been enough once. Probably capitalism had just taught them to expect even more.

***

By the time he discovered Victor, he had finally begun to reconcile himself to the capitalist system. He'd accepted the fact that the state was no longer willing to recruit promising young students for him to train, nor to subsidise that training until they had succeeded in delivering on their promise. In short, figure skating was slowly becoming a sport for talented children whose parents had money – and for coaches who were able to seek out that winning combination.

So Yakov had of necessity become an entrepreneur, manufacturing his own opportunities. Victor hadn't been delivered onto his doorstep by the state. Nor had he come to light – as was also traditional – at a provincial competition. Instead Yakov had found Victor one Saturday morning taking private lessons in the park on Krestovsky Island, the leafiest corner (had it not been January) of the city. The teacher was no one Yakov knew, a nonentity. The woman watching from the side of the rink turned out to be a nanny, and spoke only French, but the little boy with snowflakes landing in his silver hair had been only too happy to talk after his lesson. He lived, he said, on Kamenny Island. It was quite possibly the only Piter address more prestigious than the neighborhood where they were standing.

A week later he had found himself awkwardly perched on a couch in the elegant sitting room of a Kamenny Island dacha, sipping from a cup of tea whose handle was so small that he had to grip it between thumb and forefinger. Victor's mother was polite – in the same way she would have been polite to her investment advisor or interior decorator, no doubt – but only mildly interested.

"He's talented?" she asked, tapping a cigarette into a nearby ashtray. "Well, his teachers certainly don't say so. You should see his cursive. I don't think his studies will get him anywhere."

Yakov wondered whether her own studies had got her to Kamenny Island, but he knew better than to ask. Perhaps they had.

"If it keeps him out of trouble, then why not?" she continued. "You should see him, he never sits still. Jump, jump, jump. All I do is try to find ways to tire him out."

"I'll tire him out," promised Yakov. "For one thing, he has a year of catching up to do. Most children start with us at four."

He didn't mention the cost of the introductory skating program at Yubileyny Sports Palace. He doubted that Valentina Nikiforovna would consider it relevant – and, truth be told, he suspected that it wouldn't be long until the state took an interest in subsidising her son's talent. It had taken just under a year. 

For five years after that Yakov and Victor's mother had maintained their peaceful coexistence in accordance with the implicit terms of that first meeting. She had ensured that Victor was generously supplied with skates and costumes, and that he was delivered on time to lessons and competitions, but beyond that she seemingly took very little interest in the hours that Victor spent at the Sports Palace every day. Yakov had never asked her to do so; in his view parents were better seen than heard, and ideally they were not seen either. For his own parents to have expected any sort of say over their son's training would have been laughable.

So they continued until Victor was eleven and had just been named to the Russian National team – already having swept the novice categories at the Warsaw Cup, the Tallinn Trophy and the International Cup of Nice, as well as the Russian Pre-Junior Nationals. That was the year Victor appeared at the rink one day and announced that his family was moving permanently to Paris. The reasons had been unclear to Victor himself beyond a vague connection with 'business.'

Yakov had spent weeks scouring his address book and his wide network of contacts for a French figure skating coach worthy of Victor. _(Didier Gailhaguet? Surely not.)_ Victor had spent the same weeks threatening his parents with a hunger strike which he put intermittently into practice.

In the end the situation had resolved itself in a way that, in retrospect, seemed almost inevitable: although Victor's family had indeed moved to Paris, Victor himself had moved in with Yakov and Lilia.

***

Nearly a decade later, Yakov was only too happy to be sending Victor abroad, if only for a few weeks. It was summer, the season when the horizons of a skater broadened from their usual practice rink to encompass other practice rinks in other countries. Victor was off to spend a weekend with his parents in Taormina – or was it Capri this time? – before his six-week tour of Asia with Fantasia on Ice.

Yakov himself was flying to Innsbruck for the fourth annual installment of the Yakov Feltsman Summer Camp. So far it had been a modest success, at least insofar as his bank balance was concerned. It had been Lilia who had suggested the Austrian Alps, on the theory that no sane westerner would be willing to pay to send their little darlings to summer camp in Russia, or even in the Baltics. She had been right, not that she had ever deigned to join him in Innsbruck.

Certainly she wasn't with him this year. He was alone and entirely without obligations. Women seemed to sense this even though he hadn't yet managed to pry the wedding ring from his finger.

After a minor, polite flirtation with an Aeroflot stewardess en route, and a lengthier but ultimately untempting acquaintance with the divorced proprietress of the café down the road from the rink, Yakov had settled on Martine, the French trainer he'd hired for the summer camp. She'd won his attention by insisting that he attempt the same warm-up stretches she was teaching the students, and things had developed naturally enough from there. 

The sex was enjoyable, if not particularly memorable. He found himself making comparisons that he would rather not have made. _Lilia is more flexible. Lilia didn't like it this way. Is she enjoying herself? Lilia would be making more noise._

 _It's an exorcism, that's what it is,_ he thought darkly, and then in his momentary distraction said a silent prayer of thanks to the inventors of Viagra.

It was the first time he had slept with another woman since – well, for some time. Yakov had not been entirely faithful to his marriage vows, but then neither had Lilia. Given how often they were apart, it had been foolish to expect otherwise. They told one another this – years too late, self-justifications dying half spoken on their lips – but neither had really believed it. The exchange had dissolved into recriminations in the end, as so many of their conversations did.

Still, it had been years since he had slept with another woman. Ironically he had found it easier to stay faithful as their marriage had deteriorated. Perhaps this just meant that he was getting old.

He pondered this lying in bed afterwards, listening to the wheeze of the ancient air conditioner in the window of the distinctly non-luxury hotel which, due to its western pricing, had nonetheless proved a stretch for the finances of the Yakov Feltsman Summer Camp.

Who had been the last? He pondered, scratching his side. Dasha maybe. Or Zinaida. He couldn't remember. What he kept coming back to was the last time with Lilia, when she had come to him from Moscow in February to discuss the divorce. A gale had been driving ice pellets into the window, and they had sat at the dining room table with all the papers from their lawyers and agreed how to divide up their life. It had been easier for them to talk then, everything already said and done. Lilia had looked disdainfully around at the state of the apartment that would soon be hers alone, and then, as if it had all been pre-choreographed, they had fallen into bed together.

 _To say goodbye,_ Lilia had said afterwards, peering at herself in the mirror as she wound her long dark hair back into its severe bun. She had looked older, Yakov thought, the skin around her eyes papery with fatigue, a bruise on her upper arm marking some mishap in practice.

"What are you thinking about?" asked Martine, stirring in bed beside him.

Yakov grunted. "How much work I have tomorrow."

She rolled over to face him, ran a hand along his chest. "Are you sure that's it?"

This was not playing by the rules, thought Yakov. She wasn't meant to press him like that. Once upon a time women had considered themselves lucky merely to be allowed into his bed, to stay until the morning. And now he was to be forced to exercise his English as well as his heart and his dick.

"No. I was thinking about Victor." It was an unconvincing lie until he spoke the words and found that suddenly he actually _was_ thinking about Victor. "He is in... Osaka now. I think Osaka. He doesn't email."

Martine made a sympathetic noise that he might ordinarily have classed as dismissive, were it not for the fact that he suspected that she had a distinct interest in Victor Nikiforov.

How to explain it in English? "He usually... usually he email. Sometimes. He..."

 _He isn't happy,_ was what Yakov wanted to say. _I don't know why. I worry._

Even his limited English was enough to express that but he knew better than to say it to a woman whom really he hardly knew.

"He is a star now," he said instead.

"He is," echoed Martine admiringly. 

She caressed his chest again but he knew she wasn't thinking of him. It was all right. He wasn't thinking of her either.

***

Victor returned to Saint Petersburg in the dog days of summer, those muggy days in July when the mosquitos swarmed over stagnant canals and the nights began closing in once again. He was late for the beginning of pre-season training, as Yakov reckoned it, having shot two advertising campaigns and done one major magazine interview en route. Well. A star indeed.

Yakov stood with his hands on his hips, digging the toepick of his skate into the soft ice while he waited impatiently for Victor to unzip his black hoodie and take to the ice himself.

"This is terrible," he grumbled. "The refrigeration system isn't keeping up. It's like we've returned to the 90s."

Looking at a massive, slushy hole over by the window, he wondered whether trying to patch it would do any good whatsoever. Thus he missed the moment when Victor finally stepped onto the rink. From somewhere in the stands a lone camera flash went off, bleached almost to nothing by the July sun pouring in through the south-facing floor-to-ceiling windows. Most of the year those windows seemed like such a good idea.

"Here I am!" said Victor, gliding on one long edge almost up to Yakov's face. "What do you mean, the 90s? Was the ice bad then?"

"Was the ice _bad_ then?" echoed Yakov disbelievingly. "You were there! It wasn't that long ago!"

Victor shrugged. "I guess so."

Perhaps he had been too young to notice. Perhaps it was just his forgetfulness again. It was others' victories that had finally persuaded the government to invest a little in keeping the place from falling apart. Perhaps, thought Yakov, their new Olympic champion could now help to make the case for a more thorough overhaul. If he managed to introduce Victor to... to...

 _Now, who would be best?_ he wondered. _The Chairman of the Committee for Culture...?_

Victor waved at him from close range, as if he wasn't used to anyone being distracted while talking to him. "Yakov? Should I show you my exhibition program? I was working on the choreography while I was on tour."

He had sent one solitary email containing a list of increasingly ridiculous concepts, then never followed up to say which one he had chosen. Yakov had never dared to ask. He wasn't certain that he wanted to know now – still, having invited Victor to do his own choreography, he could hardly take it back.

Stalling, Yakov actually looked at Victor for the first time that morning. He was dressed in Adidas from head to toe, logos everywhere. Not his sponsor; certainly not his usual style. 

_I don't care what he wears,_ Yakov told himself, _as long as he's wearing something._ It was a mantra that had got him through many years of coaching teenagers. And yet he couldn't quite leave it alone.

"Are you going through a Soviet nostalgia phase?" he asked dubiously. "First the delayed axels and now this. I feel like I'm looking at myself in 1980."

It was difficult to remember how desirable an item an Adidas tracksuit had once seemed. He'd had it all issued by the state, the due of an Olympian, and for months afterwards his cousins had seemed far less interested in his bronze medal than the prospect of getting their hands on even one small piece of that Olympic bounty.

Nowadays everyone wore Adidas. Scratch that - not everyone. Not Victor, not people like Victor. From Olympians, the tracksuit had descended the social scale until it became aspirational only for those who had nothing else to aspire to.

"This isn't practice kit," Victor announced. "This is my costume! For my exhibition skate. I knew you'd want to see it today."

From a pocket in his jacket, Victor extracted a CD and handed it to Yakov. "Here's my music. Could you put it on, please?"

Well, there was no getting around it now. He was going to see the program whether he liked it or not. Yakov doubtfully slotted the CD into the CD player while Victor took up his starting pose at the middle of the rink. It was... a squat. A _gopnik_ squat. Anyone could see where this was going. Not wanting to prolong the agony any further, Yakov pressed the Play button.

He regretted it instantly. If anything the music was even worse than he had expected – but the most infuriating thing, apart from the dubiously rhythmical throbbing in his eardrums, was that the choreography was almost good. Trapped within the prison of its concept, it fluttered against the bars, playing cleverly against the syncopation of the appalling, thumping, unrelenting bass. And the way Victor had managed to work the _gopnik_ squat into spins and hydroblades alike was at least clever.

No one could accuse Victor of going easy with his exhibition skate. This, if anything, would have been the time to experiment with a delayed axel. Instead he carelessly, almost effortlessly, landed a quad toe loop. 

Mercifully, the noise finally came to a halt – and Victor with it. He skated over to Yakov's side, wiping the sweat from his face with a corner of his Adidas hoodie.

"Well Yakov? What did you think?"

Unaccustomedly, Yakov found himself almost speechless. "That music! If you can call it music!"

"You don't like _Hard Bass Adidas_?"

"It's the most repugnant thing I've heard in my life!"

"But it fits the routine. It's about alienation, about feeling like an outsider. It's about not giving a – you know, not caring what the world thinks of you anymore."

Yakov never failed to be amused by Victor's lack of facility with vulgar language. "That'll be the day, Vitya."

"But what did you think of the choreography?" asked Victor, smiling a wan, hopeful smile.

He could have said any number of things. He could have said that it was shit and hopefully never seen it again. He could have said that it was a diamond in the rough, which it was, and risked Victor becoming insufferable. He could have said there was a certain dramatic irony inherent in playing the role of a outcast loser and then landing a quad toe loop like that.

"The whole thing was a mockery!" he said finally. "You can't skate that at a gala."

"It's not hurting anyone," said Victor. "It's not like that concentration camp program..."

Yakov spared not a syllable for _that concentration camp program_ , because what those ice dancers had done was unspeakable, beyond the pale. He crossed his arms and prepared to turn away.

"...not _offensive_ ," Victor was continuing, clearly realising that no reference to that program could possibly help his argument, "maybe just a bit tasteless. But funny!"

"Because of course no one in the real world who wears Adidas and listens to that... to that sort of music could possibly be offended."

"None of those people watch figure skating anyway," said Victor serenely. "Did you like my other ideas better?"

What was it that Victor had suggested exactly? Wearing fake muscles and doing a striptease on the ice to _Sex Bomb_. Skating to a bizarre cover of _Oops, I Did It Again_ while wearing a toddler onesie and pigtails. The mind recoiled in horror.

"Vitya, you couldn't for a moment have expected me to think those were serious suggestions!"

Victor pouted. "Of course they were serious. They would have been very good."

"You just came up with them so that I would say yes to the _gopnik_!"

A shrug. Victor put his finger to his lips. Behind it lay an enigmatic smile. Yakov wondered whether perhaps, just perhaps, Victor was beginning to feel better about life.

***

And what did Yakov do when he wasn't fussing over his skaters? He went home to his little apartment on the Vyborg Side and wondered what to do with himself. What had he and Lilia done before the divorce anyway? Recently she had either been on tour or with the Bolshoi in Moscow. When they'd found themselves in the same city, their schedules hadn't allowed for much in the way of quiet companionship: Yakov got up at 5am for early morning coaching sessions and Lilia was a night owl, used to getting home at midnight after a performance.

Arguing, fucking, arguing some more. Those things they'd always made time for. Clearly it hadn't been enough.

Yet it was strangely difficult to remember a time before Lilia. He'd been twenty-seven when he'd met her, training in Leningrad, eking out the final years of his competitive career. If perhaps less efficient than the methods of today, his training had been much sterner. No summer holiday for a Master of Sport of the Soviet Union, and not a single ice show. If the Sport Club chose to send him away to training camps in the midst of the Ukraine, isolated from everyone and everything (and it had), there was nothing he could do about it. For months before the competitive season he had been forbidden to contact his family – it would, it was felt, be too distracting. On top of everything he'd needed to show his face at Komsomol meetings, to memorise the party line and repeat it on command to convince the powers-that-be that he was sufficiently ideologically dependable to be allowed to compete abroad.

(Somehow, probably because he won competitions, he had always succeeded. It had been in the mid-80s, after he had started coaching, that he'd been banned from foreign travel for several years after getting on the wrong side of the then-President of the FFKK. Or perhaps it was because his brother and his family had emigrated to Israel.)

Even so, skating hadn't been his whole life. He'd stood in lines, he supposed, because half of life in those days was standing in lines whether you wanted to or not. During the short summers he'd strolled along Nevsky Prospect. Sometimes he'd queued at the Spartak cinema to see foreign films. When he could get tickets he'd gone to the Kirov or the Malegot. Like all young people, he'd loitered in cellar cafeterias and cafés – and in bars when he thought he could get away with drinking, which was not often. Very occasionally he'd gone to performances at the Vostok club at the Catering Trade Union's Palace of Culture, and was proud of having seen Vysotsky more than once, but his position had meant he couldn't dare anything too visibly countercultural. In retrospect he regretted never having been one of the crowd at the Saigon café, but that would have been a different life. At the time he certainly hadn't thought of himself a dissident.

Everywhere, at every season, he'd tried to pick up girls – and very often he had succeeded. Probably, truth be told, that had been his major hobby. No one was stopping him doing it now. No one but himself. Maybe it would be the best way to get his mind off things. Maybe not.

It wasn't as if there was any shortage of things to do in Piter nowadays. If he wanted he could eat in a different restaurant every night of the year, see a different film, go to a different bar or nightclub. Only somehow the idea didn't appeal. 

Instead he spent a few rest days dutifully visiting the places you might take a cousin from the provinces. He went to the Hermitage and the Russian Museum, making his way past the thronging cruise ship groups into galleries still undiscovered by the tourists. Room after room was empty; he wandered past Gainsboroughs and Repins and Arkhipovs, hearing nothing but the echoing of his footsteps on the parquet floors. It had been years since he'd last been there; as always, he found himself wondering why he'd left it so long. His only companions were the gallery attendants, older women no doubt working to eke out meagre state pensions. Some of them smiled at him conspiratorially as he entered their room, as if he and they had something in common.

After having his fill of paintings one day, he found himself strolling along the Griboyedov Canal wondering what to do with himself next. It was an unseasonably hot August afternoon, that dead time when the warmth of the day has reached its height but the sun has not yet declined into evening. Everything seemed to be wilting slightly, parks and people alike, tourists scattered around in exhausted little groups. All sensible folk had no doubt left the city for a _dacha_ on the Gulf of Finland. He asked himself why he hadn't gone to Gatchina instead.

Yakov stopped to lean on the railing. He extracted his handkerchief and ran it across his damp head, which was inevitably beginning to burn in the sun. Next to him were three British women poring over a guidebook and debating something between themselves. One of them looked tentatively at him and smiled, though she didn't know him from Adam. Yakov nodded warily at her. She was perhaps forty, almost pretty, with strands of blond hair coming down out of a loose ponytail.

Emboldened, she took a half step towards him. "Excuse me, I'm terribly sorry, but do you speak English? We're trying to find a café where we can have a rest, do you know anywhere good nearby?"

"A little bit," he said, embarassed at the way the English words stumbled off his tongue. "Yes."

Lacking inspiration, he recommended Café Singer and then said he was walking that way anyway. She politely pretended not to notice that this was a lie. Perhaps she and her friends were just interested in talking to a Russian. As he'd half hoped, they invited him to join them at the café.

Over tea and cakes they exclaimed over the panoramic views of the Kazan Cathedral and told him the story of their visit. They were three friends from Nottingham – the blond woman, her friends mentioned with studied casualness, was recently divorced – and they were here because they had decided to try something more exotic than a Mediterranean cruise. Today was their final full day in the city; tomorrow, after a whirlwind morning tour of the Yusupov Palace, they would be flying home. They loved St Petersburg.

Well, so did he. It was his adopted city, after all, though he would always be a Muscovite at heart.

When the divorced woman, whose name was Olivia, asked him what he did, he answered only that "I am a coach of sport." He had no interest in complicating things by mentioning the Olympics or Victor (whose name she might recognise), and clearly she lacked enough interest in sport to pursue the question.

They asked him about the Cold War, about _perestroika_ , all the usual questions. They asked whether he had visited England before. He had indeed: Birmingham, 1989, the European Championships. Sasha Fadeev had won.

"Yes," he said. "First time in late eighties. With a, a... sport delegation."

"It must have seemed very different."

Yakov shrugged. Both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, he had travelled abroad more times than he could count. He still remembered his first time competing at the Prague Skate when he was seventeen – he'd hoped to go a year earlier, but the competition had been cancelled after the uprising in 1968. He still remembered his first trip to the United States for the 1980 Olympics. Apart from that everything blurred together. 

Now, programmed into his new mobile phone, he had the numbers of coaches and choreographers and officials from every figure skating nation across the globe. It was not novel to be talking to foreigners, although once upon a time it would have been thrillingly forbidden. He still felt a tiny sliver of that thrill, talking to these women whom he'd picked up on the streets of his own city.

They carried on asking about the fall of the Soviet Union. He found himself telling them about the failed August putsch of 1991, when communism had been in its death throes.

"I was in Leningrad, here. How did we know something happened in Moscow? On TV, instead of news, was _Swan Lake_. Morning, night, _Swan Lake_. Nothing else. For days! It's a good ballet, but..."

Yakov shrugged expressively. They all laughed, as he had intended.

"What did you think?" asked Olivia. "What did you do?"

"Watch _Swan Lake_. What could I do?"

He didn't mention that the state broadcaster had been showing the Bolshoi production: Lilia's _Swan Lake_ , in which she had danced Odette and Odile. That summer morning he had felt a cold chill when he turned on the television for the morning news only to see his own wife on the screen, with the transmission periodically interrupted by the same dry announcement from the Committee for the State of Emergency. Lilia had been in Moscow then, her apartment barely fifteen minutes' walk from the Kremlin.

It had all come right in a few days – she had stayed well out of the path of the tanks, and Yeltsin had put down the putsch – but he would never forget the fear that had clutched at his stomach as he listened to the Voice of America on shortwave radio while watching Lilia dance.

Although he had fallen silent, Olivia was still studying him. He hoped she liked what she saw; he might be nearing sixty, but he was on the ice six days a week, and still fit enough to manage all of the single jumps apart from the axel.

For his part he liked what _he_ saw. She was generously proportioned, all soft curves, like one of the peasant women Arkhipov had painted. The lacy edge of her bra was just visible above the low neckline of her top as she leaned forward to take a lump of sugar for her tea. Entirely different than Lilia, from the athletes and dancers who were his usual type; he thought he was in the mood for a change somehow.

Her skin flushed faintly when she noticed he was looking at her. He didn't look away immediately; he wanted her to notice. She met his gaze when he lifted it to her eyes, smiling a little as if she was amused – or perhaps flattered? – to have caught him. Yakov congratulated himself inwardly. It might have been a long while but he still clearly had _something_.

It was one of Olivia's friends who looked at her watch and exclaimed about the time. They had to get back to their hotel, tonight was their tour group's farewell dinner. It was Olivia who suggested that they meet for a drink in the hotel afterwards. Of course he took her up on it. 

His heart sank when he stepped into the expensive, modern hotel, its lobby full of tourists and suitcases and posters advertising second-rate ballet companies. But what else had he expected? _Yasha, what an old fool you are. Martine was one thing but this is ridiculous. Are you trying to go back to your youth? Is this all compensation because you can't land an axel anymore? Or because your student stood on a higher step of the podium at the Olympics than you ever did?_

And yet he was committed now. In up to the hilt – if not yet literally. That thought stirred him a little. So he gave up his pride and walked into the hotel bar.

***

Yakov woke up at 4.30am, as cleanly and sharply as if his alarm had gone off. It was still before dawn. Feeling the starched hotel sheets against his skin, hearing the anonymous rush of the air conditioning, he had a moment of disorientation. _Where the hell am I? Nebelhorn? Ondrej Nepela Memorial? Who's competing? No, it's August, it's still too early._

A moment later he caught himself, remembered, and was no happier. He got up as quietly as he could, pulled on his rumpled clothes in the dark, and left the room without waking Olivia. 

Thankfully the hotel lobby was deserted at that hour. He asked the lone, sleepy girl on the desk to call him a taxi and went outside to wait. Tour buses already lined the curb, waiting to be loaded for their journeys to Moscow or the Golden Ring. Some of the drivers were loitering outside the hotel entrance, their cigarettes glowing in the blue light of pre-dawn. Did they wonder what he was doing leaving the hotel at this hour? It was probably his imagination. 

"Excuse me," he said to one of them, regretting the fact that you couldn't call people _comrade_ anymore, "could you spare a cigarette?"

Yakov finished the cigarette before the taxi arrived, despite the fact that he'd quit smoking back when Yeltsin was still president. (Everyone had smoked back then: they had cared more about their weight than their lungs. Lilia, who never tired of reminding him that she'd picked up the habit from him, still did.)

He asked the driver to take him straight to the Sport Club, so that he got there earlier than everyone else. He went straight to the showers to wash off the smell of stale whisky and sex and cigarette smoke, then changed into the clean shirt and trousers that he kept in his office for emergencies.

He opened a cupboard and looked thoughtfully at the bottle of vodka that he also kept for emergencies. (Or, really, for entertaining visitors.) A little bit of the hair of the dog, perhaps? He found himself thinking of that line from Yerofeev: _Oh, that most impotent and shameful time in the life of my people – the hours between dawn and opening time!_ No, he wasn't quite that far gone.

Instead he went to the canteen for a very strong black coffee. It didn't do much good: he still felt like he'd been just scraped off the bottom of someone's shoe. And why? He'd only gone one round with Olivia, because that was all he could muster these days anyway. He'd had four and a half hours of sound sleep, which as an isolated phenomenon ought to be enough for anyone, and it wasn't as if he'd really had that much to drink. Old age was turning him into a lightweight. How Lilia could still perform five or six nights a week, he had no idea. Maybe he ought to take his own advice and spend more time in the gym. Maybe he should start worrying about his cholesterol again.

Half an hour later he stepped out to the rink to find Victor sitting on a bench lacing up his skates. Victor smiled up at him, warm and sunny and without a trace of suspicion, clearly not imagining that his coach had spent anything other than a dull, solitary night in the little apartment on the Vyborg Side.

"Morning, Yakov! How was your rest day?"

 _Ah, that's what it is,_ thought Yakov. _My conscience._

Somehow realizing this didn't make him feel any better. He wondered whether Olivia had already left the hotel, whether there was still time to leave her a message with an apology. It was probably too late. Story of his life.

"How was your rest day?" repeated Victor, having had no answer. "Good?"

Whether or not Victor actually cared about the answer, Lilia had at least succeeded in drilling the basic rules of politeness into him. Not that Yakov was particularly grateful for this at the moment.

"Terrible," he said. "There are too many tourists in this city now. You can't go anywhere without running into them all over the place."

Victor laughed. "I know what you're going to say now. _Back when this was Leningrad, we didn't have crowds of tourists._ But that was because no one wanted to visit!"

Yakov grunted in response. It was all a comment like that deserved. It was all he wanted to admit to.

"Makkachin and I went swimming!" Victor continued. "Out in Komarovo. We had a great day."

 _However sad an excuse for a man I may be,_ thought Yakov, _at least I don't talk about a dog like it's my best friend. Maybe it is his best friend. But never mind. We have work to do._

"You'll have a great day today too," he said, "if you can clean up your transitions."

***

The start of the competitive season blew in suddenly with the first gusty winds of autumn off the Gulf of Finland. He had no time to sit around feeling sorry for himself. Now that he could travel abroad to competitions whenever he liked, the only question was when. Take Georgi to the Ondrej Nepela Memorial and leave Victor training with Dima? Send Dima to Bratislava with Georgi and concentrate all his attention on Victor? Travel on from Bratislava to Zagreb to meet Mila at the Golden Bear, her first big international competition? (However deep the Russian novice ladies' field might be, he believed in taking his skaters abroad early. If only he could spare the time.)

His late morning office hours stretched out into lunches spent poring over schedules and entry forms with the sport club secretary, so that he ended up dripping bolognaise all over Victor's travel plans for Skate Canada. Occasionally the administrative demands piled so high that someone had to come and remind him that he was running late for the early afternoon on-ice training session. Once it was even Victor.

Nonetheless it all came together in the end. Like he did every year, Yakov started chalking up results on his office wall calendar:

_12 - 16 September - Lombardia - Liza 18th_  
_19 - 22 September - Ondrej Nepela Memorial - Georgi 2nd_  
_25 - 28 September - Golden Bear - Mila 3rd_

Skate Canada in October was the first of the season's big competitions. Only Victor would be competing; Victor was more than enough to worry about.

Even when Lilia had been Victor's regular choreographer, her schedule at the Bolshoi meant that she had rarely been able to accompany them to competitions abroad. (For the Olympics, she had received a special dispensation from the Director.) So it was not at all unusual to stand by the boards watching Victor's performance without Lilia at his side, nor to sit alone with Victor in the Kiss and Cry afterwards. It only felt strange because he knew why she wasn't there; presumably everyone else knew it too. 

How excited they'd been when they'd first been allowed to travel abroad together in 1990, when fears of defection were beginning to fade alongside the general unravelling of glasnost. It had been a Hochhauser tour to the Royal Opera House, more momentous than usual because Lilia had just been named _prima_ of the company. 

They hadn't joined the mile high club in the toilet of the Aeroflot flight from Moscow to London; they hadn't even come close. In actuality they had spent the flight reading quietly side by side, daring occasionally to hold hands, Lilia's thumb rubbing across his palm. But when they'd been able to speak privately, it had become clear that they had both been imagining the same thing. They'd restaged the scene in the tiny shared bathroom of their Hammersmith hotel that evening – and in retrospect the imagination was just as vivid as the reality.

Freed from the oppression of constant KGB surveillance, he'd had a lot of free time for sightseeing. And of course he'd attended all of Lilia's performances. It was the first time he'd been conscious of being seen as 'the husband of Lilia Baranovskaya' rather than a man in his own right. (Someone had even referred to him as Yakov Baranovskaya. Without thinking he'd immediately shot back an indignant "Baranovsky!")

At Skate Canada, more than fifteen years later, there was no danger of anyone mistaking him for anyone other than Yakov Feltsman. Except perhaps that he was now on the verge of becoming 'the coach of Victor Nikiforov.'

Victor triumphed at Skate Canada with a quiet ease very unlike the tightly-wound brilliance of his Olympic performance. There was no need for him to be tightly wound because there was no one else in his league. He smashed every record with his short programme, and followed it up with a long programme in which he finally landed his long-threatened quad lutz. Since there was no Lilia in the Kiss and Cry, Yakov had to give him enough hugs for two. It wasn't difficult.

Afterwards Yakov sat in his hotel room and watched the CBC one-hour replay of the competition. It was a stern test of his English comprehension but he wanted to know what people were saying about Victor. Unsurprisingly the commentators had quite a bit to say.

_And now here's the replay of that jump... look at the height on that! With any other skater you might have assumed this was a popped triple axel, but this is Victor Nikiforov. It's a delayed axel and he's jumped it exactly it's meant to be jumped. We used to see them all the time back in the old days. Brings you back, doesn't it? Nikiforov has said that he included this jump in his program as a tribute to his coach, Yakov Feltsman, but personally it reminds me even more of Robin Cousins. Something about those long legs. Only not even Robin Cousins ever got that sort of height on his axels. Nikiforov's not going to get many marks for it, but to be honest I don't think he cares. He doesn't have to care._

***

After that triumph, what could an exhibition skate possibly add? Yakov asked himself this as he stood with the other coaches at the side of the dim, dramatically lit rink, waiting for Victor's performance to start. Fitting his status as a champion, he was skating last of all in the gala.

Standing between Yakov and the exit was Tamara Trusova, swathed as usual in a fur coat that was practically larger than she was. Like him, she had competed for the Soviet Union in the 70s and then moved into coaching in the 80s. They had been cordial rivals ever since. He wondered whether he could squeeze past her without exciting too much comment, without anyone really noticing. He didn't need to watch Victor's exhibition program. He'd seen it before, too many times. It would be nothing new. And Victor didn't need him around; now that he had taken Victor's skate guards, Victor would probably never even realise that he wasn't there.

That was the theory. In practice, Yakov's sense of duty was too overdeveloped to allow him to leave, not to mention that he was certain Tamara would make a fuss if he tried. So he stood and watched as Victor, wearing an Adidas tracksuit and a flat leather cap, prepared to take the ice.

What almost none of Victor's fan club would know, but the television commentators would undoubtedly grasp any second now, was that Victor wasn't wearing any ordinary Adidas tracksuit. He was wearing a Team Russia uniform from the 1980 Olympic Games. Not a good quality reproduction, and not a collector's item from an auction house, but one of Yakov's own, protected all these years from his cousins and lovingly stored away in a box until a few days earlier. Victor had begged long and hard for permission to borrow it and Yakov had eventually relented. What else was he going to do with it, after all? Save it for his nonexistent children?

"Fuck your mother," breathed Tamara Trusova in an undertone. "Is that...? Yashka, you didn't."

Seeing Victor gliding out onto the ice in his old Olympic uniform aroused a tragic awe in Yakov's soul, a feeling he hadn't expected. He found it almost impossible to believe that he, Yakov Davidovich Feltsman, once upon a time – for about six weeks before the Games – had actually possessed a 29-inch waist. And yet it was true: apart from being slightly short around the ankles, the tracksuit fit Victor perfectly. It was like watching a ghost of himself.

Only Yakov would never have skated a program like this in his competitive days – the technical content would have been beyond his wildest dreams and the social commentary unthinkable.

If the program had started as a joke for Victor, he certainly wasn't treating it like one. Starting from the very beginning, when he leaned up against the boards miming smoking a cigarette, he poured his heart and soul into it. Those acting classes Yakov had insisted upon last year had finally borne fruit. So did all those leg days in the gym. Victor leapt out of his repeated squats like he was dancing the _hopak_. In fact, what the program did was turn the stereotypical habits of the _gopnik_ into a sort of character dance. One imagined that the Igor Moiseyev Ballet would be beating down his door any day now.

 _Look at that,_ thought Yakov. In performance, it was like he was seeing the program again for the first time. _He really does have a talent for choreography._

Halfway through, Victor shed his jacket to reveal a tight, white undershirt. Screams of excitement from the crowd. A minute later he tossed aside his cap too, revealing a head that had been buzz cut that afternoon under conditions of great secrecy.

Tamara Trusova let out a low whistle. "They'll be crying in the fan club tonight."

"Let them," said Yakov. "It grows back."

But Tamara was right. When he left the rink after the gala was finished, he looked up into the stands to see Victor's fans streaming out of their seats in a febrile state of shock, unbearable excitement blended with extreme grief. One or two of them were actually crying.

"He _can't_ have shaved it _all_ off," one girl was repeating passionately. "He can't! He wouldn't! They do things, you know, make-up artists..."

Another looked down at him with hatred in her eyes, as if he – _he!_ – were somehow to blame for Victor's new haircut. As if his own baldness were the result of a personal vendetta against hair, rather than something he had anxiously tried for years to forestall and bitterly lamented ever since. Did she not notice that the hair he had left reached down to his collar? Of course not. She probably just thought that he was too old and ugly to be bothered with anything as frivolous as a regular haircut. (To be fair he was too busy to be bothered with a regular haircut, but he'd also been wearing his hair on the long side ever since the free-flowing days of the seventies.)

Yakov shook his head and went in search of Victor. He found him in the mixed zone surrounded by a crush of journalists. Yakov shoved a television camera out of his way and went to take his place at Victor's side. Unsurprisingly Victor was busy answering a question about his _gopnik_ skate.

"It's a commentary on the post-Soviet condition," he said, sounding like an art school graduate at a gallery opening. "Some say we were better people back then: more idealistic, more united, less materialistic, all of that. I don't know, I barely remember the Soviet Union. Yakov tells me a lot of stories about it, and then says that I don't understand him at all. So I wanted to choreograph something about the differences between the generations, his and mine. It's not really about _gopniks_ , it's only symbolic. If I'm making fun of anyone, I'm making fun of myself!"

 _That's not what he told me it was about,_ thought Yakov. _He's moved the goalposts! Very clever of him._

He might have suspected Victor of insincerity: as he had learned when a young competitor himself, a little light insincerity when dealing with the press was no vice. On the other hand, he knew Victor, who had never had difficulty holding two distinct ideas in his mind in close succession. Back in July, when Victor had still been in the grips of his mysterious grief, it had been a raw and clumsy cry of alienation from the world; now in October it was pseudo-art-school post-Soviet social commentary. If you were Victor Nikiforov, nothing could be simpler or more obvious.

"Also," Victor added, smiling, "I thought it would be a great challenge to try skating to that song. And it was. I really enjoyed it. I hope to choreograph more of my own programs in the future."

How flexible Victor was, and not just on the ice. Yakov felt stiff and old by comparison. He supposed he would have to learn to reinvent himself just as Victor was doing. Again.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Lilia had said to him that strong people could reinvent themselves as many times as was necessary. It was an aphorism of hers, something that had probably been passed down through generations at the Bolshoi. She had believed it, and she had made him believe it too. Now, what seemed a generation later, Yakov knew he would have to remake himself once more – this time into someone who didn't take Lilia Baranovskaya as his lodestone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little bit of inevitable socio-cultural context...
> 
> [Adidas: A Love Story](http://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/8676/adidas-brand-russia-rubchinskiy)
> 
> [Who are Russia's gopniks?](https://www.rbth.com/society/2016/03/30/who-are-russias-gopniks_580301)
> 
> ['Hard Bass Adidas'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZxxH76tUBg) (though note the visuals are American!)
> 
> [A profile on life at the Yubileyny Sport Club in the lean years of the 90s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhGUwUVrRhs)


	3. Chapter 3

Lilia was in Piter so rarely these days; it made sense to arrange to see her while he was in Moscow for the Rostelecom Cup. At least this was what he said to her over the phone. She grudgingly agreed to meet him for tea at the Metropole Hotel on Thursday between the end of her last afternoon rehearsal and the start of the evening performance.

He arrived early, so early that he couldn't stand the thought of sitting alone in the café for forty-five minutes watched over by the waiters, whether disdainful or pitying. He took a couple of turns of the grand lobby, remembering those days when it had been impossible to simply walk into a foreign tourist hotel without a very good reason. Then he went out into the blue twilight and the swirling flurries and the yellow streetlights of a late November afternoon in Moscow.

With care he crossed the eight lanes of traffic to Teatralnaya Ploshchad, where buses were already disgorging excited tourists looking forward to their evening's entertainment. It was still early; no doubt they would be going in search of dinner first. He drifted over towards the entrance, looking at the posters for the current productions. _The Nutcracker_ already, earlier and earlier every year. It had been decades since Lilia was young enough to dance Masha – but this year, with her star power no doubt a factor, the roles were being split western-style. So Lilia starred in the poster, glitteringly resplendent in pink (not her color) as a faintly sinister Sugar Plum Fairy, balancing in an arabesque _en pointe_ in the arms of her partner Sergei Lisitsyn.

Her partner and, he was almost certain, her lover. Whether or not they'd become lovers before the divorce... although he had his suspicions, there were some things it was better for a man not to know. If she had, if she hadn't – it made no difference to the breakdown of his marriage.

Nonetheless, Yakov studied the picture carefully. Sergei was a full twenty years younger than Lilia, nearly thirty years younger than Yakov, only a few years older than Victor. His ballet tights left very little to the imagination, although Yakov was unimpressed with the contours they revealed. He knew he could show better himself.

A few stray snowflakes had stuck to the glass of the frame, obscuring Lilia's face. Yakov reached out with gloved fingers to wipe them away.

Without thinking about it he found himself pushing through the crowd towards the box office.

"One for the _Nutcracker_ tonight," he said when he reached the front of the line. "Best seat available."

"Sold out," said the woman behind the counter instantly.

"You must have something that's been held back."

"No. It's sold out."

"It's not as if this is a first night or a new production. It's a Thursday in November! Press tickets, staff tickets, the director's box. Returns, no-shows. There's always something. Lilia Baranovskaya is my wife – my ex-wife. I know how it works."

The woman looked at him without a shred of belief in her tired eyes. She was easily as old as him; she had seen it all. Although neither of them remembered, they had probably seen one another a dozen times before, back in the days when he'd tried to see every production in which Lilia was performing. Back then he'd only had to pick up the phone and ask in order to find, waiting at the box office, a free ticket tucked inside an envelope inscribed _With the compliments of the Bolshoi Theatre._ Well, he wasn't going to ask her now.

Yakov glanced over his shoulder, looking around the square for anyone lingering in the cold. But as impossible as it might seem, it looked as if there was no one selling.

He dug impatiently in his back pocket for his wallet, fingers already beginning to stiffen in the cold. He fumbled with the wallet and slipped the woman two hundred rubles. "Look again."

Not a flicker of expression passed across her face. "There might be returns," she said grudgingly. "Come again half an hour before the curtain."

He knew better than to push any further. He stepped from the portico of the Bolshoi into a swirl of wind and heavier snow, seating his hat a little more firmly on his head. Half lost in the snow and the decreasing visibility, the tourists were still exclaiming and taking pictures. "It's like a fairytale!" said someone in English.

Yakov wasn't sure about that but it was no business of his.

***

He had been sitting in the Metropol café for twenty minutes, beginning to wonder whether Lilia had forsaken him even in this small thing, when he looked up from the coffee he had ordered to keep the waiters at bay and saw her striding into the room. Even if he had never heard of Lilia Baranovskaya, he would have picked her out the moment she arrived. She was simply but elegantly dressed, wearing a high-necked cashmere jumper over stylishly skinny trousers and knee high boots. Her hair was loosely pulled back, cascading down her back in its natural waves. She carried herself faultlessly erect, immaculate.

"I don't know why you wanted to see me," she grumbled, taking a graceful seat, not even looking in his direction as she pulled the leather gloves from her hands. "Do you have some news you weren't willing to disclose over the phone? Are they still tapping your calls?"

Yakov chuckled darkly. "Who knows? Nothing ever really changes."

He was flattered by the fact that she wasn't standing on ceremony. It would have been excruciating if she had decided to treat him as someone in need of politeness.

Lilia was already beckoning the waiter over. "Bring me some smoked salmon and two hard boiled eggs. Maybe some pickled mushrooms."

"We don't..."

She interrupted before he could get the words out. "I don't care if it's on the menu. Don't tell me that the Metropol Hotel doesn't have eggs or smoked salmon in the kitchen. I'm dancing the Sugar Plum Fairy in two hours. Don't waste my time."

After taking Yakov's order for honey cake and more coffee, the waiter left hurriedly. 

Lilia looked at Yakov for the first time. "Well, Yasha," she said, her tone a little softened, "what did you want to talk to me about, after all?"

The idea of having to justify it – wanting to see her, having something to say – took him aback. So he said the first thing that came into his head, the most obvious thing. 

"Vitya's choreography."

Lilia tilted her head quizzically. "Are you not happy with it? He won at Skate Canada."

"Did you watch Skate Canada?" he asked, surprised.

"No. You wrote to me about it afterwards."

"Of course I did." He remembered sitting in the dim 'business center' of a Toronto hotel in the small hours of the morning, trying to navigate an unfamiliar English computer keyboard, wondering what time it would be in Moscow. "We've given it a few tweaks since then, he's settled into it now. I expect an extra ten points at Rostelecom, I told him, and five points more by the Grand Prix Final."

"If it's about adjusting the choreography... I wrote to him and said that I would come to one of the practice sessions here if he wanted my opinion in person. It's my work, after all, even if it isn't ballet; I do take some pride in it." She paused. "Did he not tell you? He never answered my email."

Yakov shook his head. "That boy is a useless idiot."

"This isn't news, Yasha."

Sometimes he had the distinct feeling that Lilia had never liked Victor.

"He's had a difficult season," he said. "Ever since the Olympics. You know how it is. When you've wanted something for so long, once you get it, sometimes you..."

"Mmm, yes," replied Lilia curtly. He wondered whether she was thinking of something in her own past, or in his. "But it's no excuse for rudeness."

"You're right. I'll speak to him."

He wondered whether Victor had refrained from contacting Lilia out of some misplaced sense of loyalty to him. The thought warmed his heart for a moment before he considered that it was equally likely to be Victor's forgetfulness or his current unsettled state of mind.

"And you should come to Rostelecom," Yakov added. "Obviously the free skate is out of the question, but if you're free for the gala, it's in the afternoon..."

"It would be awkward, don't you think? I told you it was better to make a clean break."

It had been awkward to sit at Skate Canada without a choreographer by his side, knowing that everyone knew the reason why even if no one dared admit it to him.

"You deserve some recognition for your choreography, even if it's only at Rostelecom."

"Yasha, no," said Lilia Baranovskaya, "No. I'm not coming."

After that firm rebuff he was relieved to see the waiter coming with their food. It meant an interruption to the incipient argument, an opportunity to start again. 

Thankfully Lilia's plate contained exactly what she had ordered. She gave the waiter a single nod of approval and then turned her full attention to the plate. Yakov concentrated on his own coffee and honey cake, knowing better than to try to interrupt her while she was eating. She was always ravenous after a long day of rehearsals.

After her hard boiled eggs – and most of his cake – had disappeared, he drew breath again. He resolved to ask her something simple.

"So, Lilya, how are you?"

Lilia shrugged. "I'm still dancing. Sometimes I get a shot to 'freeze' the joint."

She had been having trouble with her hip for some time now; they had argued fiercely about this treatment when they were still married. Yakov didn't believe in it and he had told her so in no uncertain terms. He never would have recommended it to his own athletes: the risk of a future injury from numbing present pain was just too high.

 _What future is there?_ Lilia had replied. It perhaps had sounded more bleak than she had intended, but Yakov knew what she meant. His athletes were fifteen, twenty, maybe twenty-five years old, with their whole lives if not their whole competitive careers ahead of them. As a _prima ballerina assoluta_ in her mid forties, Lilia knew she was living on borrowed time; she was willing to mortgage her future up to the hilt if it allowed her to pay the demands of the present. In their case, in the case of their marriage, she had sold it.

"I'm still dancing," she said again when he failed to respond, looking at him levelly in a sort of triumph.

"Still keeping up with Seryozhka," said Yakov, well aware that he was baiting her.

Lilia continued to look at him. Her only answer was to raise one eyebrow.

"I'm sorry," he said. "That was uncalled for."

"Yes it was. Jealousy isn't your style, Yasha."

He blustered a little. "I wasn't – you know that wasn't how I meant it."

Of course it was, he had meant all of it, from the condescending diminutive onwards. Could she not see that he still loved her, that believing their divorce was for the best had done nothing to change that? He wondered sometimes whether she loved him too or whether she had left him without regrets. She had her dancing; nothing on earth could compare to that. Even her Seryozhka only mattered to her, if he mattered at all, because he was her partner on stage. So Yakov told himself.

Whatever she might (truthfully) accuse him of having done, and with whom, he had at least never loved anyone else. He wasn't sure if the same was true for her. He wasn't sure he wanted to know.

Did she, in the middle of a rehearsal, ever find herself suddenly captured by the thought of him, as he thought of her while watching his skaters going through their spins and edge work? Did she ever think of him when she woke in the middle of the night – then realise, as if for the first time, _never again_? If she did, she gave no sign of it.

 _Never, never again,_ he thought, looking at the woman sitting across the table from him. Apart from her face and hands, the only bare skin visible was her narrow wrists, where the sleeves of her cashmere jumper had ridden up slightly. She was delicately using one tine of her fork to collect the last scrap of smoked salmon from off her plate. She was so beautiful.

 _Of course not before the performance,_ he thought. _But maybe afterwards? A quick fuck in her dressing room? We've done it before. It wouldn't have to mean anything._

And yet he knew it would mean something to him. She would know it too. He had too finely developed a sense of self-preservation to make the proposition.

"You're dancing the Sugar Plum Fairy tonight?" he asked instead.

In answer Lilia flourished her hand and mockingly sang a few notes of the chiming celeste melody. A family at the next table turned to look. Now that Yakov thought of it, they had actually been glancing in her direction for some time. Clearly they knew who she was.

"Tonight and for six more weeks," she said. "By the end it will probably give me diabetes. At least it isn't so much time onstage."

"Mmm," said Yakov, nodding and trying his best to sound like a good listener. 

It wasn't that he wasn't interested. It was just that he was also imagining having her on the table in her dressing room after the performance, her legs wrapped around his waist, sweat still beading on her skin. She would bite her lip to keep from calling out his name, run her hands through his hair.

Well. So it was a few years out of date as a fantasy. He was a few years out of date too.

Before he could begin to muse too seriously upon that fact, he dragged his attention back to the real woman sitting in front of him. She was stealing the last forkful of cake from his plate while simultaneously checking her watch. 

"It's getting late," she said, "I had better go now."

Echoing her, Yakov looked at his own watch. "Yes. I have a – a meeting to get to."

They lost themselves then in a flurry of small movements. Signalling for the bill, paying, gathering up bags and all the small accoutrements of winter weather. The waiter came with their coats. Without ceremony Yakov plucked Lilia's fur coat out of his hands so that he could help her into it himself. She glanced up at him, put one hand to the deep collar to smooth it down. A few droplets of water still clung to the long guard hairs. Half an hour earlier they had fallen as snow.

His own hand lingered too. The sharpness of her shoulder blade was lost amidst the fur, yet he could feel it under his palm with the imagination of memory.

"Lilya. It was good to see you."

As she looked away, he let his hand fall to his side.

"This wasn't a good idea," she said, busying herself with looping her scarf around her neck until it was so tightly wrapped that it seemed to hold her chin rigidly upwards. "We didn't need to meet."

"Why shouldn't we meet? Who cares whether we do or don't? If this is about..."

"Yasha, shush." She looked at him, lips curved in faint amusement. "It's nothing to do with anyone but us. It just makes things more complicated. We agreed to make the divorce a clean break. We agreed it was better not to see each other. We agreed there would be no more need to argue."

"I'm not arguing! I just..."

"You _are_ arguing, Yasha! Just listen to yourself for once in your life."

"And you're a stubborn bitch."

"And I'm late," said Lilia Baranovskaya. "Goodbye, Yasha. Goodbye."

She went up into a high _relevé_ to briskly kiss him twice, once on each cheek, a businesslike farewell. Then, pulling on her gloves, she strode from the room. The staging of her exit was let down only by the fact that she was stopped near the door by a small but determined gaggle of autograph seekers.

Yakov followed her out of the hotel; striding quickly, she crossed Teatral'nyy Proyezd and disappeared into the snow, which was coming down more heavily now. He stood on the corner for what felt like an eternity, but in reality was probably no more than two or three minutes. He waited until the traces of her footsteps in the snow had been erased by the swirls and eddies of passing traffic before crossing the street himself.

Back at the box office, the woman he'd seen before showed no sign of recognition, only pushed a single ticket towards him under the grille. "Three thousand rubles."

It was exortionate, all the Bolshoi tickets were these days, but what could he do other than pay? He didn't even ask whether the seat was decent. He thrust his credit card in her direction and told himself that he could always take on a few more private students.

The entrance to the theatre was packed and overheated, the steam heat obviously on full, all the windows covered with condensation. People coming through the door had tracked dirty, melting slush all over the marble floors. Yakov quickly took off his coat and scarf – and then, after a moment of thought, his hat as well. The place was thronged, a buzzy, overexcited, uncertain audience full of tourists and young families all pausing on the grand staircase and under the enormous chandeliers of the main foyer to marvel and take their pictures. 

Not bothering with a program, he pushed his way through the crowds and made his way to his seat. A box, but not a very good box. Certainly not a three-thousand ruble seat. And he was a stray single man settling himself awkwardly in the second row beside a well-dressed middle-aged couple who seemed to quietly resent his presence in their elegant evening out. At least leg room wasn't a problem: as his coach had told him approvingly in his teenage years, he had short legs, perfect for figure skating. His shoulders were another matter.

A young family pushed their way through to the front row of the box a few minutes before the curtain. The little girl, around seven, had her hair in a bun and wore a sequined party dress. She was already fidgeting with barely suppressed excitement, but had neither the build nor the carriage of a Bolshoi Ballet student in the making.

"Now Sonya," admonished her mother wearily. "Don't kick the wall."

Once the curtain rose she fell silent, enraptured. It was Yakov who found himself fidgeting, shifting his weight until his seat creaked beneath him, drawing warning looks from the middle-aged couple. Christmas trees and snow and children's parties, what did he care about any of that? 

For the whole of the first act his mind wandered everywhere but the stage in front of him. He thought about everything he had to do at Rostelecom – team leaders' meetings, jumps to be corrected in practice, bedtimes to be enforced, and all the rest of it. He'd done it a thousand times before and yet it all came back around again, never finished. He dug a pen and an old airline ticket out of his bag, scribbled down some notes in the dim illumination of a scene change. _Check Liza's zipper again. Buy button thread? Ask Josef about choreographers._

At intermission he bought a whisky, even more ridiculously overpriced than the ticket. He downed it unceremoniously, thinking now of Lilia and how he had squandered his time with her. _I should have told her about Vitya, really told her, not skirted around it. I should have asked her advice. I should have kept my mouth shut about Seryozha. I should have said that since the divorce... that I don't really..._

But his thoughts were no clearer now than they had been at the Metropole. He left his glass on a windowsill for someone else to collect and went back to his seat. Upstairs, in some small practice room tucked under the eaves, Lilia was no doubt still rehearsing her solo. She detested waiting in the wings.

When she took her place on stage, everything stilled for a moment before the pounding, rhythmic applause of Lilia's claque began. The rest of the audience joined in, swept away with enthusiam. Yakov himself clapped a few times; then he felt self-conscious and stopped.

As the Sugar Plum Fairy, Lilia was _sui generis_. Yakov had always heard overtones of grief in the music for the _pas de deux_. Listening to the long descending lines of the strings, he could well believe what he had once read, that Tschaikovsky had written the piece while mourning his sister's death. Yet he had never before seen it danced in that way. In Sergei Lisitsyn's arms, Lilia embodied the bittersweetness of nostalgia for youth, the pangs of anticipatory grief and regret, the sense of time slipping through one's open hands. Masha's own consciousness of growing up, projected onto this fantasy world.

Dancing the solo she was even more striking. There was nothing sweet or charming in her. She was all brittle and fragile edges like spun sugar ready to snap, treacherous like thin ice not yet ready to bear the weight of a mortal man. She had the glamour of the elves, otherworldly and almost sinister. Each chord in the strings was a warning, the startled thump of the human heart.

He could see the painful thinness in her chest, the patterning of breastbone and ribcage visible beneath the skin when she lifted her arms above her head. Had she lost weight? Once upon a time he had known every line of her body as intimately as if it were his own. He watched carefully for any sign that she was favoring her left hip, any trace of pain, but could see none. Nothing was visible but the glassy surface of perfection.

When she finally acknowledged the rapturous cries of the audience, curtsying again and again, her smile had a brilliant warmth. It was a smile that she reserved for the stage alone. As she looked out into the theatre, Yakov was briefly afraid that she would pick him out from the crowd. But he had stood to acknowledge enough roaring crowds himself, blinking upwards through the glare of lights at a dim, swimming wall of faces. He knew it was impossible. She gazed in his direction and saw nothing at all. 

During the third curtain call he could see her smile change. For a moment it became smaller, narrower, more private. A little twitch at the corner of her mouth spoke of her own inward pride in a job well done. Soon it would be time for a car home, and a chamomile tea, and bed. Once upon a time she would have been going home to him.

It was impossible to get a taxi afterwards. The snow had set in, swirling and stinging in the face, accumulating in the streets. In the distance there was a faint rumbling of snow plows doing their rounds. Yakov shrugged and descended into the Metro.

***

Next morning Moscow was silent under a blanket of newly fallen snow. In the whole city it seemed that only the competitors and their coaches were awake, standing and stamping their feet outside the hotel, waiting to board the buses that would take them just down the road to the Megasport arena for practice. It was even too early for the paparazzi. Certainly it seemed that the bus drivers were still asleep. It was a waste; they could have walked there more quickly and been warm while doing it.

Yakov stared up at the lead grey sky, the final snowflakes straggling wearily downwards, and clutched a cup of black coffee that he really had no interest in drinking. He took a sip. It was as terrible as he'd expected; it was also hot. He took another sip.

A few meters away, Josef was smoking with a couple of the other coaches. It was as if they hoped the distance would negate the bad example – or perhaps that no one would notice. Yakov noticed. He wanted a cigarette so badly he could taste it, but he had his pride.

"Where _are_ they?" said Nathalie Leroy. "Rink time starts in ten minutes."

"Welcome to Russia," said Yakov darkly.

Another morning, another rink, another competition. Once upon a time he'd found all of this exciting. At the moment he couldn't quite remember why. More than twenty years he'd been coaching now. The Soviet Union had fallen and the KGB minders disappeared. The technical demands of the sport had changed out of all recognition. And yet sometimes it felt like nothing was really different. Sometimes it felt like he'd done it all before.

Maybe it was time to start thinking about retiring. Not immediately, of course, but perhaps once Victor retired. Four years, say, after the next Olympics. By then he'd be state pension age, not that it made any difference. His coaching career alone would be enough to leave him a comfortable retirement, even without reckoning on the Unity Gaz shares he'd bought a few years ago after an entirely unsolicited tip from Victor's mother.

A dignified withdrawal. He could say something vague about health problems, be proactive about the knee replacement that he knew was coming sooner or later. He could travel – really travel, see something other than second-rate hotels and the inside of ice rinks. Spend time in Israel with his relatives. Lie on a beach somewhere and drink fruity drinks and get sunburned. If he and Lilia could have retired together, as he once had dreamt, it would have been perfect.

That wasn't happening. He knew it wasn't happening. It was time to stop thinking about it.

So what was the alternative? Carrying on. But carrying on how, that was the question. He couldn't afford to rest on his laurels any more than Victor could. An Olympic gold was a remarkable achievement – more than he ever dreamt when he first started coaching – and it looked as if Victor was set to go on winning. But that was Victor. More was expected of a coach, if he wanted to prove that he was a great coach in his own right and not merely the coach of one brilliant student. He knew that if he tried to rely upon Victor's talent to secure his own legacy, then he would deserve to be forgotten.

(Once his sister-in-law Rosa had asked him why he looked so angry when one of his students lost a competition. He had answered, glossing the truth very slightly, that he was only angry with himself: "It's my defeat too, you know! Do you blame your patient if he dies on the table?" In reply she had only laughed and shaken her head.)

It was possible that he would never see the likes of Victor again. Alexei was ready to be put out to pasture now; Georgi was dutiful but painfully inconsistent; puberty hadn't been kind to Lizaveta; Mila was only eleven, far too young to be certain of anything but a stellar season in the Advanced Novice field. And there were no other skaters at the Sport Club who looked remotely capable of world-class competition. A cheery thought for a cold Friday morning.

Yakov looked around to see where Victor had gone. He wasn't too far away, jumping in place to keep warm, windmilling his arms. Then he put one foot up on a bollard and started some desultory stretches. Desultory by Victor's standards, at least. He pointed his toe, leaned forward and rested his forehead on his knee.

"Vitya, what the hell are you doing?" A few people turned their heads to look at him. Volume, he supposed. He was used to projecting across a crowded ice rink. "You know better than to stretch out here in the cold! You never listen! I'm getting tired of telling you – "

Victor turned an appealing gaze in his direction. "I wasn't _really_ stretching, Yakov. I'm just bored..."

"Don't give me excuses! You are a prize idiot! If you hadn't won gold, you wouldn't be worth the trouble!"

"No, Yakov. I'm sorry, Yakov."

Was he imagining it or were a few of the western coaches giving him disapproving glances? Of course he hadn't meant anything by it; Victor knew that. Some people seemed to think he was an ogre. Just because he shouted a little? Were skaters such delicate flowers that they crumbled into dust at the slightest hint of a raised voice? If anything he was too soft on his students, too swayed by sentiment. Lilia always said so.

That thought reminded him what he'd actually wanted to shout at Victor about. "Come here, Vitya."

Obediently Victor came over to his side.

"Lilia tells me that she offered to attend to one of your practice sessions to work on your choreography," said Yakov. "She also tells me that you never replied to her email. Is this true?"

"Oh," said Victor. "No, I didn't."

"Is that all you have to say for yourself?"

In reply Victor just shrugged.

"It's unforgivably rude. You need to realise that you're an adult now. You can't rely on your coach to organize everything for you. It's your job to communicate with your support team. You have to take responsibility for your own career! You need to understand that _oh, I forgot_ is not an acceptable excuse!"

He expected an immediate, winsome apology. Victor lived by the adage that it was better to ask forgiveness than permission, and therefore this was one of his key defense tactics whenever pressed.

"It's not that," said Victor, a low intense tone. "I didn't forget. I just don't want to see her any more. I don't care about the choreography. It's fine."

Yakov was so astonished that he forgot to shout. "Why? What are you talking about?"

"I think she's treated you very badly."

"You have no idea how she's treated me!"

"I do," insisted Victor.

Yesterday night he'd seen the headline in a tabloid newspaper, lying rumpled and abandoned on a table in the hotel lobby, open to an inside page. _BARANOVSKAYA'S NEW TOY BOY._ Yakov had made an attempt – probably completely transparent to anyone who might have been watching – to glance casually at it while waiting for the elevator.

_Lilia Baranovskaya, 45, the Bolshoi Ballet's celebrated prima ballerina assoluta, has a new man in her life – and it's not just on stage. Sergei Lisitsyn, 24, the new young superstar of the Bolshoi, has been her ballet partner for the past two years. But it's now becoming clear that something more has developed between them._

Yakov had only skimmed the next paragraph, some fluff about how they'd apparently been photographed holding hands after a dinner in an expensive Moscow restaurant. Whatever that proved. Then his own name had caught his eye.

_Last May Baranovskaya got a divorce from her husband of over twenty-five years: Yakov Feltsman, 55, who recently coached star athlete Victor Nikiforov to an Olympic gold in figure skating. But Bolshoi insiders say that her fling with Lisitsyn may have started even earlier..._

When the elevator arrived he'd crumpled the paper in his hand and taken it away with him, thankful that not so many of the visiting coaches and competitors could read Russian.

Unfortunately one couldn't sweep Victor away quite so easily. Yakov grabbed him by the upper arm and marched him off to the corner of the building, putting some distance between them and the group waiting for the bus.

"You don't have any idea," he reiterated, "and it's none of your business. My personal life has nothing to do with your _professional_ relationship with your choreographer, do you understand?"

"I don't care. You can't make me see her. Besides, I'm going to do all my own choreography from now on, so it doesn't matter."

A pause. Yakov crossed his arms warningly. "Oh, you are, are you? We'll see about that."

"And – and he's not even that good looking!" added Victor, as if he believed he was delivering the _coup de grace_. "Didn't you, don't you..."

Yakov didn't want to know how that question would end. "Vitya, I am not discussing my marriage with you! Not now, not ever!"

He stomped away from Victor, back along the path they had broken together through the heavy snowdrifts. Despite his anger, he felt better all of a sudden, warmer and lighter inside. Perhaps it was his anger heating him from within. Perhaps not.

Rejoining the group of coaches, he found himself the target of a few curious glances from the foreigners.

"What was that all about?" asked Nathalie Leroy in English.

"Disobedient," said Yakov simply. This was a word that he'd searched out in an English dictionary and learned by heart. He needed to use it so often. "Disobedient boy."

Meanwhile Josef, who understood a little Russian, avoided meeting his eyes. Yakov was glad for that. He might have lived the whole of his life in the public spotlight, but every man had his limits. What he felt now was the heat of self-consciousness – an unfamiliar, uneasy feeling that he was ill equipped to handle. He studied the pavement, snow trampled down into ice, thickly strewn with sand and salt. He kicked at the ice with the heavy toe of his boot, managing to dislodge a piece that was rotten with holes where the salt had eaten into it. After that small surrender the rest of the ice resisted him, still stubborn and rock-hard.

Like the ice, Victor was resilient. He soon came wandering back to Yakov's side – then, without ceremony, he threw his arms around him.

"I'm so cold, Yakov," said Victor. "I can feel the cold air coming up the back of my neck. I never should have cut off all my hair."

"I could have told you that," grumbled Yakov. "Enjoy your hair while still you have it."

Victor said nothing in reply, only hugged him a little tighter and pressed his face against Yakov's scarf. Rather than standing there like a post, Yakov gave in and put his arms around Victor too. They stood together like that – he occasionally thumped Victor on the back to keep the embrace from becoming too sentimental – until the driver finally arrived and opened the door of the bus.

Yakov took a seat at the front with the rest of the coaches, like he always did; he was grateful to see Victor making his way to the back with Christophe Giacometti. He was even more grateful to see that the bus wasn't going to be full. No one would be sitting beside him.

He sat huddling a little deeper into his coat, arms crossed over his chest, looking at the patterns of the ice crystals on the inside of the bus window. The driver had turned on the ventilation, but the engine hadn't yet heated up, so the blast coming from the overhead vents was as arctic as the wind outside. As sharp and pitiless as love.

 _The boy is a hopeless romantic,_ thought Yakov. _Even at twenty he has no idea what love is really like. How disillusioned he'll be when he finally understands._

***

Neither of them had any more time to think about love that day. Together they marched into the Megasport Arena in the midst of the vast phalanx of competitors and coaches and choreographers, tracking dirty slush all over the newly polished floor tiles. All rinks smelled the same, whether or not they were part-time concert venues. There was something about the mingled scent of damp concrete, sweat, hairspray, zamboni fumes and balky coolant systems that got the competitive juices flowing. If his own old coach had miraculously appeared from his retirement dacha and said "right, Yasha, start warming up, think of the glory of the Motherland, you're on the ice in an hour," he would have done it without question.

Luckily for everyone concerned, it was Victor who was competing. Yakov watched over him as he lay down on a floor mat and began his stretches with the help of a foam roller. Then Yakov wandered off to get a cup of coffee. Victor could look after himself for a few minutes at least.

By the time he got back – having been buttonholed by one of the Italian coaches asking for restaurant recommendations – Victor had claimed his own patch of space for the real warm-up. Anyone who thought that figure skating was glamorous had never seen the underbelly of an ice rink, all concrete floors and overhead ducting. Victor was practicing to the background of a loading dock, a few stacked pallets and an out-of-service zamboni. Someone had left a yellow 'danger: slippery floor surface' sign nearby, no doubt congratulating themselves for paying due attention to health and safety.

"Vitya!" barked Yakov. "Watch out for that puddle!"

Victor came out of a spin and looked at Yakov. He questioningly pulled out one iPod earbud. "Hmm?"

"There's a puddle on the floor." 

"Oh," said Victor casually. "Yes. I know it's there. I won't land in it."

He put the earbud back in and immediately wound up for a triple salchow, which he landed with perfect insouciance.

From only a few minutes of watching Victor, Yakov had a good feeling about the upcoming free skate. There was something in the way a skater moved at the peak of his form, some extra grace that concealed the effort of the muscles – utterly impossible to put into words, of course. Yakov wondered whether he himself had ever looked like that.

And yet at the same time there was a curious vulnerability in a skater off the ice, a naivety or perhaps a gingerness in the way they moved, as if they always half expected to find themselves in a different element. It roused an upwelling of protectiveness in him that he usually mistook for nerves. He'd felt the same way when he'd first seen Lilia on the ice, when he'd taken her skating while visiting Moscow to compete in the Prize of Moscow News, eight months after their first meeting at an official reception. That was the night he'd proposed to her.

"Enough jumps, Vitya. Time to get ready to go. They'll be calling your group soon for practice."

***

Yakov's instincts were still sound. Victor triumphed in his free skate: first place in the Rostelecom Cup and first in the standings for the Grand Prix Final. So the feared post-Olympic slump had come to nothing in the end – nothing that mattered on the ice, anyway, apart from Victor's appalling exhibition skate.

But that was still in the future. Tomorrow, to be precise. So there was no point in worrying about it.

Yakov embraced Victor, slapped him on the back, brandished a bouquet of roses victoriously for the television cameras. He gathered up all of Victor's things, followed him out of the Kiss and Cry, and watched over him in the mixed zone while he did his interviews with the press. Yakov did his own interviews while Victor, who hated leaving the rink still sweaty from competition, was in the showers.

"To what do you attribute Nikiforov's success...?"

"Is he working on any other jumps...?"

"Do you have any comment on the recent article linking your ex-wife...?"

"No!" shouted Yakov. "That is irrelevant and out of line! You should be ashamed!"

Of course it was a Russian journalist. How he hated the modern press. Soviet newspapermen would never have dared to ask a question like that. Even abroad he would only have been expected to deny being a professional athlete, deny doping, and then say the usual words about hoping to bring peace, brotherhood and international understanding through sport. It had been a simpler time.

He and Victor made it back to the hotel amidst a whirlwind of camera flashes and windblown snow. Yakov stomped up to his hotel room, threw an armful of soft toys onto the bed, and wondered what the hell he ought to do with himself now. Any other night it would have been past time for bed. But the drama of competition, as always, had left adrenalin surging through his bloodstream with no obvious outlet.

He paced the room a few times. Then he began to walk through the elements in Victor's free skate, a gesture here and a small spin there. Painfully little floor space, but if he started between the bathroom door and the bed... He sketched a single toe loop, landed with a thump and overbalanced, ending with his hip banging up against the desk. Well. Perhaps not quite enough room. He would have a bruise there tomorrow.

Someone – no doubt someone who was familiar with the rhythm of an off-ice jump – thumped on the wall next door. Yakov shook his head at his own silliness, wiped off his forehead with his handkerchief, and went downstairs in search of the hotel bar.

At that hour it was only just beginning to fill up with the ISU crowd and hangers-on trickling back from the Megasport Arena. No doubt most people were keeping their powder dry for the banquet after the gala, but there were a few stalwarts already installed. In one corner a few FFKK officials were heatedly discussing the latest _diktats_ sent down on high from the ISU. Yakov wanted no part of that. To make matters worse he'd knocked one of them off the podium at the Soviet Figure Skating Championships back in 1971 and the man had obviously never forgiven him for it.

So Yakov went to the bar to order a whisky and then took a seat by himself at a small table near the entrance, so that he could watch the comings and goings in the foyer. The Leroys flanking their ladies skater; a couple of judges engaged in serious conversation. Yakov strained to hear what they were saying but he could make nothing out. In fact he wasn't entirely certain what language they were speaking.

And here was Tamara Trusova, wrapped in the fur coat that was almost larger than she was, her hair newly dyed peroxide blond to hide the grey. (Or maybe it was a wig; that was one solution to hair loss.) She slowed down as she approached his table.

She gave him a nod. It was the closest she ever got to a smile. "Yasha."

"Tamara."

"I saw the news. You should have listened to me. I always said that we would have been unbeatable together."

He couldn't help smiling himself. "Was that before or after you said that I was a jumping machine without an artistic bone in my body?"

That had been on the way to Lake Placid, in the arrivals lounge at JFK while the customs officials were busy trying to come to grips with the arrival of a whole planeload of Soviet athletes. She'd had too much to drink on the plane and no doubt had spent the whole of the Atlantic crossing worrying about her own weak jumps. Their coaches had intervened before she could embarass them too much in front of the Americans. Like him, she hadn't been young then, and she wasn't any younger now.

She shrugged. "Probably around then." 

"I rest my case."

"Still. I never liked Lilia."

 _You never liked me either,_ thought Yakov, but he forgave her that. You didn't have to like someone to respect them as a rival. That didn't mean that he had to listen to her talking down Lilia.

"The feeling has always been mutual," he said.

Perhaps Tamara realised that baiting him this way wasn't going to work, because she switched tacks. "Tell me you're not going to let Nikiforov do that terrible exhibition skate again tomorrow."

"Which would that be? The one he choreographed himself? The one that everyone's talking about?"

"You've let him make himself into a laughing stock! And you along with him! Is that any way to represent Russians to the world, as drunken fools? Vladimir Vasilievich would be rolling over in his _grave_."

"Put him in a Cossack costume and give him an old warhorse, that's the way to do an exhibition skate, is that right? Let me remind you that the Cossacks were hardly angels!" Lilia was from Ukraine; she had told him her family stories. "It's the twenty-first century, Tamara! Do you want us to become completely irrelevant? Move with the times! I don't give a damn what Vladimir Vasilievich would have thought."

Vladimir Vasilievich had been the president of the Figure Skating Federation of the USSR back in their day. Although he had been in his grave for a decade now, and the Soviet Union even longer than that, saying this out loud still gave Yakov pause. He glanced over at the FFKK officials but they were thankfully preoccupied with their own concerns.

Still he wondered what the hell he was doing coming to the defense of 'Hard Bass Adidas.' On a purely aesthetic level he agreed entirely with Tamara. He was counting the days until he saw the end of it. And yet he had agreed to allow Victor to skate the program, so he felt obligated to defend the choice as if it had been his own.

"Well, that's obvious," grumbled Tamara. 

She looked down at him. He wondered whether she was about to invite herself to join him – or whether she was waiting for an invitation. A moment later she wandered off towards the elevators.

"Goodbye, Yasha," she said over the shoulder of her fur coat. "See you tomorrow."

Yakov went to the bar and ordered another whisky. Perhaps he should have offered to buy Tamara a drink. It wouldn't have been terrible to have a little company. On the other hand, it would have been Tamara's company, and he wasn't sure he was in the mood. A bit of heated disagreement cleared the air; it was good for the soul. Any more than that was slow poison. A lesson he ought to have learned far earlier.

He was sitting and sipping his second drink, thinking that it should be his last, when the elevators doors opened and he heard a very familar giggle.

_"Alors il a dit..."_

That was Victor's voice – and, as the language was French, Yakov was almost certain that the companion was Giacometti. He glanced up from his drink and saw them heading in his direction, arms around each other's waists. Both wore so much stretch fabric and glitter that they could have been on their way to another competition.

_"Oh, c'est Yakov! Un instant."_

Victor came over to his table, gait ever so slightly unsteady. Clearly Yakov wasn't the only one who had been drinking. "Hi Yakov!"

"Where do you think you're going?" growled Yakov. "You have to skate tomorrow!"

"Out," said Victor vaguely. "Only for a couple of hours. Chris has never been to Moscow before. And this is his first time qualifying for the Grand Prix Final! I promised I'd help him celebrate."

"That's what the banquet is for."

But he felt old and tired and disinclined to argue any more. After all they were both adults; shockingly, Giacometti was eighteen now. If they wanted to stay up all night and skate hungover at the gala, it was their business. Let them learn their lesson.

"Go," he added, waving a hand in Victor's direction. "Go. On your head be it!"

"I'm just taking him to see Red Square," said Victor, a superfluous – and obviously untrue – excuse.

Yakov grunted and took another swallow of his drink. 

Victor pulled out a chair and sat down at Yakov's table. He leaned forward, lowered his voice to an almost confidential tone: "Yakov, are you feeling OK?"

"What are you talking about? One of my skaters just won the Rostelecom Cup and I'm sitting here in the hotel bar having a quiet drink afterwards. Why wouldn't I be OK?"

"Just – I don't have to go out if you don't want me to. I could stay. We could talk about getting ready for the Grand Prix Final. Or my Christmas ice show. Or something. I don't mind."

"If you two don't get out of here right now, I might get the idea to come clubbing with you!"

Victor went. Although making an effort not to look in his direction, Yakov could hear his murmuring conversation with Christophe.

_"Je pense qu'il est de mauvaise humeur... Je ne sais pas pourquoi..."_

And then there was the whooshing of the hotel doors, and the slight breath of cold air, and Yakov was alone again. He downed the rest of his drink, stood up with only a slight wince, and headed towards his room. There was always the minibar, after all.

***

It was Yakov who woke up with a pounding hangover the next morning. Perhaps Victor was waking up with a hangover too; perhaps he had never gone to bed. So far it was no concern of his. He rolled over in bed, wincing at the slight swirl of nausea that accompanied the movement. _8:17,_ the clock read. So he forced himself upright and got into the shower.

Oleg Petrovich, his coach, had believed neither in hangovers nor in feeling sorry for yourself. "Work harder the next day," he'd said. "That's the quickest cure there is."

It might have been thirty years since Yakov had been a competitive skater but these lessons were impossible to forget. After his shower he shaved, dressed, went down to the lobby and asked the concierge to call him a car. He was off to look for new skaters.

The driver looked sceptical when Yakov told him that the destination was Lyubertsy. "You sure?" 

Yakov was sure. Any fool could hang around the big rinks; he made a point of going to the outdoor ones with terrible ice in the outlying suburbs. He had a rota of rinks that he worked his way through whenever he came to Moscow. There was no denying that he'd been tempted to choose somewhere nearer, somewhere more convenient. But what was the point of having a rota if he didn't follow it?

So they drove all the way out to Lyubertsy: around the Third Ring Road, out past the encircling MKAD, beyond the reach of the Metro and the municipal buses, into the domain of the private _marshrutkas_ – or, if you were lucky, a private car expensed to the Sport Club. 

He was heading for Torpedo Stadium, a small sports ground set in a park. It had a grass field and bleachers to seat a few hundred. In the summer the local football team played there; in the winter it was flooded for ice skating. Right next to it was the district Palace of Culture, which looked like a shabby miniature Bolshoi Theatre. So reflected Yakov as he made his way through the gates.

It was a cheerless day. The low, dark clouds could muster only a few idle flurries, exhausted after the snowstorm two days earlier. The temperature had risen to near freezing but with it had come a damp chill perhaps even worse than the cold. Yakov stood by the snowbank at the side of the rink, drinking a steaming cup of terrible coffee that he'd bought from a kiosk outside and shivering despite the warmth, wondering why the hell he put himself through this.

Retirement seemed once again like an appealing prospect. He had never much liked scouting for young skaters. It required diplomacy, which – coach Oleg had always told him – was not something he possessed in abundance. Did he really have the energy to go through this all again? Better by far to accept that his legacy would be Victor's talent, rest on his laurels and enjoy it while it lasted. Then he could take an early retirement from coaching and become a commentator for Match TV or write an opinionated column every week for _Sport Express_. What bliss.

He stood drinking his coffee and watching the flow of skaters around the rink. It was exactly what you'd expect from this sort of rink: family groups with toddlers sliding in all directions, anchored only by a mother's hand; boys in hockey skates dodging through the other skaters; teenage friends doing more gossiping than skating, gathering in the bleachers to smoke; and inevitably a few little girls at the middle of the rink in skirts and tights, earnestly practicing their tiny jumps. Yakov spent some time studying them but there was nothing to see. He would bet money that none of them would ever progress beyond singles, however hard they might work. In short, the trip had been a waste. He would finish his coffee and then try to find a taxi back to the hotel.

Yakov tossed down the lukewarm dregs of the coffee and began to get ready to go. Then the crowd on the rink parted and a skater at the far side caught his eye.

It was a skinny little boy with big blue eyes, wearing an unzipped puffer jacket over a tracksuit. His head was so severely shaved that it was almost impossible to tell the exact colour of his light hair. His skin was as pale as milk, that near translucence that spoke of centuries of Slavic inbreeding combined with borderline vitamin D deficiency. _A gopnik in the wild,_ thought Yakov, amused. _I should have brought Victor along. Maybe he would have found some inspiration for his skating._

But that wasn't what had caught his attention. The boy was being coached into a waltz jump by a girl with similar looks, not that far out of her teens. Her instructions were laughably wrong but somehow he was getting the rotation anyway. Along with a surprising amount of height.

Yakov remembered Victor dismissively saying 'none of those people watch ice skating,' and found himself suddenly ashamed – on Victor's behalf, yes, but even more so on his own. He, the son of a factory worker, had once upon a time believed passionately in the universality of sport. He still did.

He looked again at the boy. Aside from the little would-be figure skaters in the middle of the rink, the children on the ice were chasing each other, shouting, clowning around, but he was doggedly repeating the jump over and over again. Yakov couldn't see why he hadn't broken an ankle by now.

He sighed, sat down on the bench and started pulling on the skates he'd brought along. If nothing else, he had a moral duty to offer a basic correction, since it looked like no one else was going to.

Yakov stepped onto the rink and skated up to the two of them. Inevitably the boy had hit the ice; he was hauling himself to his feet and getting ready to try again.

"Hold on," said Yakov. "Your entry is all wrong."

"I know how to do it!" replied the boy, affronted. "I only fell once!"

Yakov shook his head. "Watch. Your toe pick..."

There was no need to use words. He demonstrated the entry once or twice, slowing and exaggerating his movements so the boy could follow, then coaxed his aching joints into a simple, textbook waltz jump. He would not have praised the execution in any of his students, but even nearing sixty he was one of the better skaters on the little rink in Lyubertsy.

"Like that. Do you see?"

The girl raised her eyebrows at him, but the boy's eyes widened with dawning comprehension. " _Oh._ Yeah."

Yakov reached down to correct his stance. "Arms... shoulders... hips... there. Try again now."

With a determined look on his face the boy pushed off, skated a few strokes and jumped. To Yakov, at least, the improvement was clearly perceptible. Even the height of his jump had increased. The boy slid to a halt and looked up at him.

"Again," said Yakov.

Without protest, without question, the boy set his jaw and did it again. Even better this time. Looking down at his feet, Yakov could see from the looseness of his skates around his ankles that they were at least one size too big.

"I am a figure skating coach," said Yakov to the girl. Always better to ask forgiveness than permission. "My name is Feltsman. Yakov Davidovich. You might have heard of me."

A blank look. She clearly hadn't.

"Alla Nikolaevna," she said with a weary familiarity, as if he were a petty bureaucrat whom she could not afford to offend. She gestured towards the little boy. "Yuri Nikolaevich."

"Your brother?" he asked carefully. Sharing a patronymic, they might well be siblings, but it could equally be chance, or the sign of an absent father. He didn't want to cause offence. He had been caught out before.

"My son."

"He has talent."

She only shrugged. What was it to her? Clearly they had only come ice skating to while away the morning. And this was exactly the reason why Yakov took the time to come out to smaller rinks like the one in Lyubertsy. At the bigger rinks, where he was better known, he now inevitably found himself deluged with middle-class stage mothers desperate to get their over-trained and under-talented little darlings noticed. It had gotten old quickly. Whatever you might say about Victor's mother – and he had said quite a bit over the years – she was at least nothing like that.

"More than a little talent," Yakov added, having gotten no real reaction from the previous statement. This was further than he was usually willing to commit himself.

"You should see him on a skateboard," said Alla.

"Mm," said Yakov dismissively. He turned to the boy. "Do you have lessons?"

"I don't need lessons. Mama showed me how."

That made his mind up for him. "I don't normally take on students until they're a little more established," he told Alla, "but I do run a summer camp. We're holding a one-week session in Moscow next year, and I – "

She folded her arms. "If you think I have the money to spend on summer camps and skating lessons and..."

"I'm not asking you for money." _And this,_ thought Yakov, _is why I'm not going to retire rich._ "If he's as talented as I think, I'll give him a full scholarship. An investment in his future career. And after that, if he's good enough, the state will pay."

"The bear dances but the tamer collects the money," said Alla, but it was no demur. Despite herself she looked impressed.

Yakov wondered what he could say that might seal the deal. He looked around the rink in search of inspiration. A girl was attempting a spin, her long hair flying out behind her. He turned back to the boy in front of him. 

"Have you ever heard of Victor Nikiforov?" 

Little Yuri looked offended at being asked such a simple question. "Of course I have. He won the Olympics."

"I'm his coach."

Nothing. If anything, a fleeting scowl passed across the boy's face.

"He's skating tonight at the Megasport Arena," Yakov added, throwing in the final inducement. "Would you like to come and see him? To watch him skate?"

Yuri crossed his arms, a small, sceptical echo of his mother. "I guess."

In all his years Yakov had never seen a child look so unimpressed at the idea of meeting a great figure skater. Even Victor had been keen to meet Alexei, although he had quickly surpassed him. Somehow, paradoxically, Yuri's nonchalance seemed promising.

Yet even on the rink in Lyubertsy, there were others who were not so nonchalant. Perhaps it was Yakov's waltz jump that had drawn attention, turned him from an anonymous old man in a felt hat into someone who was capable of being recognised. Somewhere behind him there were faint murmurs of excitement. Someone was saying his name.

A woman approached him, pushing a little girl before her. It was one of the girls who had been practicing jumps in the middle of the rink.

"Excuse me, Yakov Davidovich, my daughter, she..."

 _Even in Lyubertsy,_ thought Yakov. _It's everywhere now._

"No," he snapped. "Out of the question. I'm talking to this boy's mother. Thank you."

Alla was looking at him with a new interest. However annoying it might be, it always paid to be seen to be in demand. 

"I can get you tickets to the gala tonight," he told her. "But before that you should come to the practice session and meet Victor. Both of you, obviously."

Alla Nikolaevna was either trusting, bored or easily star struck – because when Yakov left the Torpedo grounds in search of a taxi back to Khoroshyovsky and the Megasport Arena, she and her son came along with him.

Perhaps if he'd been a smoother operator, Yakov would have used the opportunity to share more insights about the joys of figure skating, the uncountable benefits of training with Yakov Feltsman, and the fame and fortune that might await the talented and hardworking if they embraced the opportunities that presented themselves. But his hangover was still lingering around the edges of his consciousness and he didn't feel much like making conversation. Alla seemed to have accepted the situation with a sort of passive acquiescence, and little Yuri was glued to the window of the taxi as if the grim vistas of the Third Ring Road were entirely new to him.

Yakov crossed his arms and silently watched the tower blocks slide past outside. The clouds were beginning to break, glancing rays of sun lighting the grey of concrete and snow with hazy touches of gold.

 _Victor will make the case for me,_ he thought, satisfied. _Saying anything else would be superfluous._

***

Yuri's only observation when they arrived at the rink was a simple one: "Wow, it's inside. Like on TV." 

Predictably delayed by traffic, they had missed the beginning of the practice session. All the skaters were out on the ice already, some chatting and joking, a few of them running segments from their exhibition skates. With the competition over, it was as if a storm had passed through, the atmosphere suddenly lifted. Even Liza, who'd had another poor result, looked almost happy with life; Victor was of course the center of attention, the queen bee of the rink.

Although Yakov had ushered his two guests to rinkside seats, Yuri wouldn't sit down. He stood leaning over the boards, as if he wanted to get as close as possible to the action. He watched intently as they ran through the group numbers.

Whatever Tamara Tarasova might have thought about 'Hard Bass Adidas,' the controversy hadn't stopped Rostelecom from inviting Victor to perform it at the gala. They could hardly have done otherwise. Unfortunately this meant that Victor would be practicing it now.

Waiting for his music to start, Victor glanced over at Yakov and his companions, gave a little wave. He was dressed for the part in his (modern) Adidas tracksuit.

"Look, Mama," said Yuri in an undertone. He pointed. "That one's Victor Nikiforov."

Victor never did things by halves – it was one of the most rewarding, and infuriating, things about working with him. However you reckoned it, a gala practice was not ordinarily a performance, but knowing that Yakov had guests seemed to spur him on. He held nothing back. His rendition of 'Hard Bass Adidas' was intense, hilarious, somehow poignant despite its overt ridiculousness. It was Victor down to the ground.

He stepped off the ice afterwards with sweat rolling down his high forehead. He looked exhausted – the late night with Giacometti could not have helped – but when he approached Yakov's companions he put on a bright, generous celebrity smile.

"Hello there, I'm Victor Nikiforov! What's your name?"

"This is Yura," said Yakov, putting a hand on the boy's thin shoulder. "I found him doing waltz jumps out in Lyubertsy. Never had lessons. He'll be coming to the Moscow summer camp next year."

"You look like my uncle Lev," said Yuri, narrowing his eyes suspiciously at Victor. "Was that supposed to be funny?"

Victor's bright smile faltered, as if a director had suddenly called the expected scene to a halt. "Maybe a little."

"Well, I didn't think it was funny."

At that Victor looked genuinely stricken. He made one more attempt to drag the encounter back on script, his smile resuming as if its absence had been no more than a glitch in the transmission. "Would you like an autograph?"

"I want to see your gold medal," said Yuri. "You have a gold medal, don't you?"

Victor laughed. "I don't wear it around my neck every day. It's in a glass case at home."

"What's the point of that?"

"Having won is the point. Everyone knows that I did, whether I'm wearing the medal or not. You knew, didn't you?"

Yuri didn't look as if he wanted to admit this. "When I win mine, I'll wear them all the time."

"Oh, are you planning to win a lot of medals?"

"Yes. I'm going to beat you someday. When I'm grown up."

Victor laughed kindly and indulgently. "Of course you are."

"So we hope," said Yakov to Alla. "But first I want to spend a little more time looking him over."

If he were in Piter, at the Sports Palace, he would have taken Yuri to an empty practice studio – or insisted on fitting himself into the corner of one that was in use already. Here at the Megasport Arena, the best he could do was the chilly, echoing underbelly of the rink, where the skaters did their warmups before taking the ice. In the wide junction of a cinderblock hallway, by a vending machine, some foam mats had been laid down for the convenience of the skaters. It was as good a place as any. To Yuri and his mother, who followed him without comment, the whole day had probably seemed equally strange. To Victor, who had tagged along without invitation, nothing could be more normal.

Yakov gave Yuri a simplified version of the examination he would have performed with a new skater at the Sport Club or a summer camp student. He had the boy strip down to his underpants, shivering, so that he could properly assess his build and flexibility. Not an ounce of fat on him, lean muscle, good straight legs. Lilia might not have been impressed with his flexibility or turnout, but he'd had no prior training. Besides, they were not looking to make a dancer.

"How old is he? Hmm. Small for his age. Difficult to tell without x-rays. How tall is his father?"

Alla gave a sort of defiant shrug and said nothing. Yakov shot a warning look at Victor. Then he told Yuri to put his clothes back on. 

From there he moved on to running, jumping, a few simple off-ice drills. He asked the boy to spin around until he got dizzy, which took a reassuringly long time.

"But this isn't skating," objected Yuri.

"This is what you have to do if you want to be a good skater," said Yakov.

"Really?"

"Every day," said Victor, snapping off a few quick, showy pirouettes.

After that Yakov took the boy through the basics of an off-ice toe loop and salchow. Victor demonstrated both without being asked, as if Yakov couldn't do it himself. Yuri picked up the instructions quickly, intent on his task, and produced high, clean jumps. Indeed, the only problem was getting him to stop jumping afterwards.

"Double sal," said Yakov to Victor, who obliged easily. Yuri attempted to imitate him, fell over and got up again with a laugh. Victor smiled and laughed too.

Alla objected: "He can't do that!" 

"Give him six months," said Yakov. "He will."

He turned to Victor and added, only half joking, "You'd better find a way to motivate yourself, Vitya. Because now I've found your replacement. In ten years he'll be you."

"There's still time to get out," said Victor.

"You wish," replied Yuri, folding his arms.

Victor folded his own arms in an unconcious echo of his would-be rival. He smiled again, differently this time. 

"No," he said. "Actually I don't."

Yakov looked between the two of them, the Olympic champion and the little boy from a no-name Moscow suburb. _Ten years,_ he thought, a sudden electric shock. _Now this is going to be interesting. This I want to see._

In years to come, Yakov often reflected on that moment. Although it had only happened in November, early in the competitive year, it was unquestionably the end of the _gopnik_ season.


End file.
